I get more than a handful of email and voicemail from offshore dev shops. I never used to be one of those guys that doesn't respond, but in this case I must be. 1. I don't have time to respond and 2. I don't want what they're selling.
This month we terminated a relationship with an offshore shop in India. They were great people and a great firm. At the end of the day though, I don't want to learn how to master the art of offshoring; I'd rather master the art of mapping great services to millions of people. We have a great internal engineering team, so we've determined it best to add more to that org rather than outsource offshore.
When you go offshore, there's a lot of overhead to consider:
-The time difference
-The serial approach to working (vs. real-time collaboration)
-Requirements must be water tight
-You have to have resources to manage the resources
-You have to black box things or tightly integrate things (a little of this and that doesn't cut it)
We started out getting resources offshore in the beginning, because we had raised so little money, that we didn't want to hire in. We knew we could get bodies quickly and control our costs. Over time we raised more money and became more aggressive on our product roadmap, so that's when we should have hired in more employees and weaned from the offshore model. We were at a point where product requirements were changing based on user inputs and so forth, so there became a moving target, which makes it impossible to succeed offshore. Offshore works best when there is a long lead time on development, whereby there is more definition and certainty. This works best when you're building a HW and SW system for example. In a consumer services startup however, you often don't know enough to have long lead times. In fact it can kill you if you bake too many plans in too far down the schedule. Besides, there's no substitute for having a crew of people slugging it out in the trenches together. Our people are proving it this week, as we crunch toward a new release.
So for startup folks reading who are building consumer services, take this lesson now, regardless of how flexible these companies say they are in working with you. If you must go with contractors, use local people onsite. The pace, quality and ability to navigate uncertainty are all better managed locally.
-MC
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