| My story: Whilst on a university placement doing some web coding and databases work, the guy in the office next to me was having real problems with his website. Being curious, I asked for the URL and took a look. A classic ASP and Access database powered website that was probably held together by bubblegum. He had outsourced the work to a Chinese company because they were cheaper than UK based companies (important point for later).
The site was full of every web security hole known. Mainly lots and lots of SQL injection holes.
He asked if I could fix the pile of garbage and I honestly couldn't, I don't like rewriting but when its an old (this was 3 years ago) tech with no English comments and their code quality zero, copy pasting everything. So in the evenings and weekends for a month I rewrote it to ASP.NET MVC (1.0, latest at the time) and SQL Server. I got him to select a template off Themeforest for $15 that I reworked slightly (and badly, I'm not a designer). He is happy, I am happy with £500 for my work. I finish my placement and go back to university but came back to my placement for another year to do a startup idea. He had moved offices and we have very little contact. After finishing university and 2 years later, I join a "Soul Destroying Corp" (not the one you are thinking of) and decide that isn't what I want to do with my life, so I setup my business and tell him that I'm now doing my own thing and looking for clients. Turns out my weekend/evening £500 website generated him around £500,000+ in revenue (not profit) and his business grew from just him to 5 people. All his sales leads came through the website. From September last year till now, I have rewritten it and we are automating more of his "manual" (lots of Word, Excel and paper) to be totally automated or a few mouse clicks. Wow, when I think back, that website was terrible but it worked well for 2 years and grew his business. Huge ROI for him but now he is paying me back by hiring me to rewrite/automate more of his business. |