I charge a weekly retainer regardless of the amount of time I spend during the week. I practice continuous delivery so the client can see the daily progress during the week. At the end of the week the client has the option to continue with the next week by paying the retainer for the previous week. Client has access to all code and infrastructure automation scripts if they decide to take over the project at any time
Counter offer that you would accept if they give the additional 20%. If they don't accept then you'll have to decide if you are willing to move forward or not.
I am kind of on the same boat as you. I have been doing ASP.NET and .NET contracting in a large enterprise for the last four years and my contract just ended so I am trying to plan the for next 10 years to do consulting and develop my own products. I picked up some Laravel and React\Redux during my time consulting and have been following ASP.NET Core as well. Last week I made an ASP.NET core boilerplate https://github.com/aregsar/house , still in progress, that you may find interesting. One concept that I am going to use for my blog posts and presentations is to have some unique perspective or theme that weaves through all of my content. I can then use that for branding and setting myself apart from others in the field. It could be a development perspective or opinion or even a controversial idea that is effective in some situations but goes against the norm or best practices. Anyway, good luck.
First I will say, in addition to the 3 that I will mention, you should have some level of experience with Javascript, ES6 and Node.
This is due to the pervasive nature of javascript in web development, mobile,realtime and client side build systems.
That aside here are my choices:
For highly scalable, fast and realtime web apps
Elixir\Phoenix is my choice for its ruby like syntax, Erlang based language with
a framework that has built in websocket support.
Alternatively you can go with Golang or Scala\AKKA throwing in some Node for realtime capability.
For medium scale web apps, rapid development, building MVPs.
Python\Flask is my choice for an expressive dynamic language and flexible framework with big ecosystem of extensions.
alternatively you can go with django, ruby\rails or php\Laravel
For the enterprise, large project, large team, maintainable web apps
C# and ASP.NET 5\Signalr is my choice for a dynamically compiled, statically typed, decently scalable with async capabilities framework including websocket support that runs on windows and linux
When answering questions in a YC interview you really need to satisfy the top 3 YC criteria for startup success.
1-Make something (a large enough number of) people want.
What YC wants to hear in the interview:
who are these people?(show us you made an effort to find them)
do they need what you are building?(show us you made an effort to find out)
what are they doing now to get what they need?(show us you made an effort to find out)
how is your solution much much better at helping them?(showing us who is begging you for your solution)
2-Make something that a small number of people absolutely love. (as apposed to something that a large number of people merely like)
What YC wants to hear in the interview:
-Show us a small set of users that would absolutely love to use your solution.(i.e. who would get upset if you stopped building your solution)
3-Teams (and execution) matter more than ideas
What YC wants to hear in the interview:
-Less focus on the technical merits of your idea/product and more focus on how you are getting users and the market you are targeting. If you did not give the right answers to items 1 and 2 above then clearly you are not the right team according to YC.(Note: If the product is highly technical you do need to show that you have a technical founder with the right skills. But that is not really the same thing as focusing on the technical details of the product)
