Without the blockchain their stock doesnt go up 200%, and its all for nothing (maybe thats their perspective, idk)

Yeah could be, My guess is they've been late to the party on everything for the 25 years and someone conned them into showing up on time for this one and it turns out the parties a dud.

I would NOT necessarily suggest Verify.as as an investment by any means but what they're trying to accomplish is quite similar.

If you can track reputation fairly then every time you make a transaction you don't have to go to court because its expensive and time consuming.

$75,000/each?

Hours?

Pretty sure the investors are already motivated in the OP's success. Unless they don't like money.

They sound like professional investors. You shouldn't give them free shit.

I actually tried using it in this manner recently to test paypal IPN notifications, but it seems like paypal denies the SSL installed on the ngrok urls. I had to setup a domain with letsencrypt instead.

How do you prepare yourself for this?

Why is the linear combination used to train the sentiment classifier? Why does its result get taken into account?

Is this linear combination between 2 different strings?

What does Google's "App Maker" mean for web developers?

What about using the process, resources, and scheduling expertise that you aquire from building products for others on your own project? Having the know how to complete projects is why people hire you're firm, so hiring yourself could be a great way to build a product on the development / design side in a cost effective manner.

Lets say that you're a small start up past the MVP stage. What would be the types of tasks that you would outsource to a consulting firm? Isn't it much more likely that you would try to hire full time and build a team / culture? Does consulting even work for this market segment?

There are situation it makes sense. Mostly around needing a specific feature by a certain date. Maybe for a particular sale, or maybe to lure a certain investor in. Either way, if your team is saturated already, and the new feature is something they aren't fond of building (eg: something heavy on frontend when your team is mostly backend), then a contractor or consultant is often the only way to have it built on time.

Finding the right employee can take time, and hiring the wrong person can destroy a team's productivity. Better to pay a premium than to get burned.

Do you think that there's room for consistent work from a company like this, or would it be more project specific work like you explained?

My experience is that it's usually project specific. If it is recurring they will, at some point, bite the bullet and hire someone.

With innovations in services like squarespace, wordpress, web development tools and frameworks, the push for kids to learn coding, and the overall push into digital / IT, good'ol web development is going to fade away into a low pay blue collar job (for most cases). Atleast thats how I interpret it.

It will (it already is), but this commoditization is common. The bleeding edge development is still happening, like people developing squarespace, wordpress, web development tools and frameworks. Look at github. Today more then ever we have a lot of software developers living from their code and giving it back for free. And we still have a lot of work to do, so actually more web development jobs will be created before it start to decrease.

We are on the same page in terms of when this shift is going to happen, and I 100% agree with you in your description of the current software ecosystem. Although, the point of my question was to explore other paths that people in web dev could consider for when that time comes.