Idea: CodeReviewWith.Me

Aug 13, 2013 business ideas

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I had this idea about doing interactive screen share and code review. I wrote it about it earlier and even asked for feedback.

I got some pretty good feedback, but I didn’t get a good enough response that made me want to follow through.

Mind you, I planned out how I’d do it - I just don’t think it’s worth the time. (I did register codereviewwith.me though, so if you end up wanting to do this idea on your own, let me know. If you’re committed to success, I’ll transfer the domain to you.)

So, what is it?

CodeReviewWith.Me is meant to be a very simple service to book and pay for reservations to do online code review with myself. Since I have more than 20 years of experience as a programmer, I thought that I am a great resource that can definitely share with others. As a matter of fact, I do a lot of code review in my daily job, so this is no different.

The initial cost was $49 for 30 minutes. You are also asked if you’d like to provide a github project or ftp access to code, as well as what your expectations are for the code review. I would aim to focus on technologies like HTML5, CSS3, Javascript (and jQuery), PHP and MySQL. I would also be available to help with usability studies and general code architecture (language agnostic service).

To pay for the time, I created a Paypal Pay Now button. On success, this would take the user to a custom URL that would feature my Google Calendar appointments calendar (Google allows you to create appointments and then visitors can choose to book one of them.) It was nearly automatic, but would require some hands-on validation of successful payment to appointments. I wasn’t going to plan on using something like IPN - just a redirect, complex URL to start.

Finally, the code review would be done via Skype screenshare/video or Google Hangout. We’d review the code together, and that would be that. At the end, I’d send that person an anonymous surveygizmo survey with a coupon for $10 off their next appointment.

I think its a great idea, a great way to make money. I just think that it would require a significant amount of marketing yet - something that I’m not willing to invest the time to do at this time.