Ian Ippolito hesitates to claim he founded Rent A Coder. It’s more like the idea found him.
Ippolito was running a software development firm in Tampa, Florida, with more work than he knew what to do with. Whenever he released a new program, people emailed him asking for little modifications. “I had all these people kind of bothering me, and I couldn’t keep up,” Ippolito says. “I saw there was a need out there: People had these small software projects that they wanted to get done, but they didn’t have access to good programmers.”
In 2001, Ippolito created Rent A Coder with the idea of helping his supplicants find qualified software developers to take on their little jobs. In just over three years, the site–a sort of eBay for software projects–has exploded, attracting a cumulative 45,000 buyers who’ve posted projects and 121,000 coders around the globe offering to take on work.
Rent A Coder isn’t without rivals; Elance.com and ScriptLance offer similar services. These networks aren’t just for programmers anymore–there’s work for Web designers, translators, proofreaders, and writers. Posting a project on Rent A Coder is free, as is bidding on it. Once the work gets assigned, the buyer puts the project cost into escrow; when the programming is done, the developer gets paid, less a Rent A Coder fee of between 7.5% and 15%. As on eBay, both parties can rate each other at the end of a transaction.
