Comments on: 7 Tips to Outsourcing Technical Work

By: Website Design Pakistan

Website Design Pakistan — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:21:55 +0000

Concise but great post and thanks Jason for sharing the link about Guy Kawasaki…

By: Jason H.

Jason H. — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:14:17 +0000

Oh, check out this post by the great Guy Kawasaki on how he built his Truemor site for $12107.09:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html

By: Jason H.

Jason H. — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:12:17 +0000

Andre, Thanks a lot for the great advices

By: Andre Nosalsky

Andre Nosalsky — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:57:43 +0000

Jason, I don’t have a preference for the country of origin, I just want them to be qualified to do the job and have a track record. Generally, Indians are better in English so if you have any writing you might go with them. Russians are pretty good hackers and are not as conservative or rule bound, which is good sometimes. But there are always variations.

Because I have no way of knowing or enforcing what happens once I do reveal certain information to the provider, the way I handle the problem of intellectual property and pirating is by splitting up a project into parts and giving it to several providers to do. So a provider might be working on one portion, but never know all of the details. Another way is to ask for references that are at least 6 month old and see if any of the old clients ended up with problems or not.

As to expectations, I have found that I need to stick to the agreement, that’s why I emphasize it so much, get everything written down. So if the project is not going right, you can look at the agreement and see if it’s your fault because you didn’t explain or give proper expectations, or if the provider is at fault, which you can just point out and most of them will fix it. Ways to avoid this is to assume very little, follow up constantly and ask to see the work as it is being progressed.

By: Jason H.

Jason H. — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 06:28:28 +0000

Andre, thanks a whole lot for this very useful post

Do u have preference with Indian or Russian programmers?

And, any advice on how to protect ourselves in terms of Intellectual Property and proprietary info?

And, any advice on how to deal/communicate with the freelancer when the final project did not turn out to be quite as good as originally expected?

Thanks!

By: Andre Nosalsky

Andre Nosalsky — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:10:37 +0000

Joel, this is exactly what you can outsource and at very very low costs. I would start with some test projects you’ll know which providers you’ll want to work with on a long term basis.

Rik, infosys is more for big corporations, it’s not very useful for small projects.

By: Rik

Rik — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:03:35 +0000

What about going with big corporate sweethearts like Infosys?

By: Joel Mueller

Joel Mueller — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:04:04 +0000

Thanks for the info Andre. After reading the blog from the Four Hour Work Week guy, I’m interested in learning more about the experiences people have outsourcing. For me, especially with simple stuff like taking photoshop files and converting them into CSS widgets — something I’d rather not pay salaried programmers to do.

The question for me is always “who is good that I should choose.” I’d even be willing to hire someone on full time abroad if they rocked and were multi-talented.

By: SpillingBeans

SpillingBeans — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 04:23:12 +0000

[...] June 5th, 2007 · No Comments From: Okdork.com [...]

By: Andre Nosalsky

Andre Nosalsky — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 03:29:23 +0000

EP, there isn’t a specific company that I recommend because sometimes companies get booked up and don’t have the resources to pull the project, so it’s just best to open it up to general bidding and the only pick companies that have a history of at least five previous 4.5/5 ratings and stick with the above plan and you’ll be fine.

If you really need a specific company I can tell you the ones that I have worked with.