[mro_master]

I perform data cleansing of excel spreadsheets and sometimes convince them to develop basic CRUD apps to take the place of excel. Depending on the project and the feeling I get about the depth of their budget I charge: per row based on the transformations they need, flat fee if they actually have well defined requirements, per hour for development time if they are convinced of the value in standing up a new web app to handle the process.

[opportune]

How do you get clients for this kind of work and about how much do you charge? This sounds pretty laid back and potentially lucrative

[mro_master]

That my friend is the secret sauce. My first job out of school was for a staffing company that pimped me out to perform similar projects. Word of mouth mostly, it's very lucrative if you have domain knowledge and can sit for long periods of time. It's not Mechanical Turk style cleansing and I have to take personal responsibility for every row as they mostly just suck up my cleansed data and roll with it, which you can't do with ML cleansed data or off-shored cleansed data. I've been thinking of launching a SaaS product but the transition from trusted consultant to enterprise SaaS is not easy. What do you do?