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Digg created for $200 bucks

Posted by Cory Bergman on January 20, 2007

Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, used Elance to hire a PHP programmer for $10 an hour to build the first version of Digg.com. Elance connects freelance programmers, designers and writers with available projects. Now, imagine for a moment if a traditional media company wanted to build a Digg. They’d ask for multiple bids from major web development companies, and the exact same site would have cost $50,000 to $250,000 or more to build over a much longer period. With the higher the cost to build and subsequently maintain, the less likely the site would turn an immediate profit. And low-risk, short-term profitability — not entreprenuership — drives traditional media companies.

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    • http://www.lostremote.com Steve Safran

      Bah. You started LR for even less.

    • http://www.greaterfalls.com david

      You’re right. Here’s a local example: our local Economic Development Agency had an outdated website — picture of the agency president, who had departed many months ago, etc. I offered to help them (free) and teach them how to incorporate blogging (to some degree) so that they could update their website instantly and at no cost. Here is the response that I got one of their staff members, in trying to explain why he didn’t update the site to reflect the interim president and then the new president:

      “…t just didn’t make sense to me to spend the money on a website update only to do it again once our new president was on board…”

      None so blind…

    • thedetroitchannel

      that $200 figure must not have included the obligatory “garage”.

      can you truly be a web wonder not starting out in one?

    • Nick Geidner

      or a dorm room/slash shitty college apartment.

    • ae

      Ugh, this “I’ll pay a pittance for your technology/programming/repair skills” attitude is why I got out of freelancing on the side.

      People will pay mucho dinero an hour for a plumber to show up to fix a leaky faucet, but not for someone’s programming skills?

      You may be able to sucker people into the TV biz for a pittance, but the other hemisphere of the telecommunications world were we IT workers reside is a whole ‘nother ballgame.

    • http://www.lostremote.com Cory

      My point is not that all web development should be outsourced for nothing to random freelancers.

      Kevin Rose had an idea for a community site, a fraction of what it is today, and he experimented by hiring some guy on the cheap to build it for him. Then he let the community help him improve it.

      This is different than improving a core site or launching a well-defined product, of which you want professionally done, and you’ll pay for it.

      Big media tends to put all web development in a single basket which excludes this sort of garage style of entreprenuerialism which has shown to be nearly unbeatable over the years for community sites (Craigslist, FlickR…etc).

    • David Johnson

      all too true, but my gut statistical check says the hit rate vs. the fallout rate on garage startups is probably about the same as those who start blogs and then abandon them. we focus on the success stories, but for every internet millionaire, are there a million washouts that never clear the first breakpoint?

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