Hey Nick,

After running an agency for a few years I finally landed on a great option for this - fixed priced iterations. We'd do some high level scope work but ultimately we'd bill by the week. We'd give clients a sense of how many weeks a project / app might take. At the end of the day, it was up to the client to keep iteration (polishing) or move on. This put the client in control and made our billing / scope so much easier.

Happy to share an example doc / contract too if that would help. Shoot me an email, hello [at] tdub.co.

Update: tons of lovely people emailed me about this. I thought I'd share here too. Feel free to make a copy or download in any format you need!

Project agreement I've used to land over 250k in contract work

Cheers!

Sorry for the drive-by but a few quick thoughts :-D -

• Consider using SASS very minimally. It's easy to create a big mess when you have the 'power' of nesting, mixins, etc. Even when using SASS I still try and write very flat (non-nested) CSS. Take a look at Myth and PostCSS too

• Re: keeping your CSS DRY - I actually think this is what creates so much mess and frustration on larger projects. I much prefer WET :-D CSS. I think this need much more discussion as it goes against the grain in current software development. CSS isn't code though..

• BEM is great. Just remember you can tweak / adjust it to fit your project.

• Frameworks: agreed. Bootstrap et el starts to have very diminishing returns on larger projects and just gets in the way. Consider using a few smaller CSS libs instead (which you can then easily remove later).

Chris - a huge thank you for working towards fixing this. While I know you guys get a lot of flak I know everyone really does appreciate what you're building. I for one have completed transitioned to Sketch and have dropped all Adobe products. Keep kicking ass folks!

Like others, I keep nothing in my dock and use spotlight instead to launch apps:

1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol Dweck
2. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us - Daniel Pink
3. Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
4. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

Yup! I've used the site as a solo freelancer as well as to book gigs for my firm. There are some great paying gigs on the site, but as Patrick noted, it's a microcosm for just about every other freelance site in that sometimes you'll just get shitty clients. Though Crew does vet the client, it isn't intensive.

I have to say though, I have had far more positive client experiences than bad via Crew and to date it's help generate over 6 figures in revenue. By far the best 'paid' lead source I've used.

A few very quick thoughts:

1. Give new hires a person to 'shadow' - not in the in the old-school sense, but someone they can go to w/ questions, someone who takes them to lunch their first day / week, etc.
2. Be organized. If it's an onsite role have their desk, hardware, etc ready to go.
3. Get them integrated into the team, project and flow on day one.

VanillaJS is plain JS ;-).