The Outsourcing Adventure Part 2
Written on October 15, 2006 by Conor O'Neill
We’re putting together a simple landing page for the new business whilst we are still in development. It became clear to us recently that we needed a logo for that to give a sense of identity and also to direct the initial colour scheme of the prototype.
I have always liked the idea of sits like RentACoder and Elance for small bits of work but had never tried them. Anthony, down in Ummera, recently asked me for advice on a site re-design he was considering. In particular, he wanted to get rid of frames. One “expert” he encountered had offered to do the work, some SEO, some “links” and a few other trivial things and wanted well over a grand for the work. I thought it was crazy money and told him to have a look at Elance. He liked what he saw, put up a description of the work he wanted, got 14 replies and had exactly what he was looking for done in less than a week for €100 by some guys in India.
Due to his success, I decided to take this route for the logo on the basis that it may not be the one we launch with but at least it will look nice. I described the basic idea and the company name and some simple thoughts we had ourselves and within 24 hours had 11 bids ranging from €70 to €200. Most of them were clustered around the €100 mark and locations ranged from India to USA to Argentina back to Ireland.
In this case, the selection process was quite easy as we did it on the basis of the portfolios. In general the Indian ones were overly fussy and too detailed. The one that really leaped out at us was the Argentinian portfolio. They have a very strong theme to their design and you almost know that the work has a latin origin. Within four days they had the proposals back to us. Most of the vendors promise 4-6 samples and then infinite revisions on the one you pick. From what I can see they (quite reasonably) put all the effort into two whilst the others are pretty much throwaway. We loved the first option, got a few tiny tweaks and will have the final work in the next day or two.
I’m now completely sold on this idea and highly recommend it to anyone looking for low value, fast turn-around work. In fact, from now on, anytime I think I’ll do a bit of work on something, I’ll do an ROI on my time first and may shoot it over to Elance instead.
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I’m particularly interested in this two-parter because I’m about to hire my first contractor. I’m outsourcing some work to a guy I met at BarCamp, I’ll be paying him full price and I’m a little uneasy about the idea of paying someone in India 1/6th that value for the same job. Questions of ethics, moral, social and national responsibility etc. fill my head. Maybe I’m being far too anal about it and need to wake up to the way this “global economy” works, but if everyone in your position outsourced overseas I’d have no job.
On the other hand, think of the savings… Might have a look around Elance.
I’m a great believer in the global economy. In my career I’ve done very well from US and Japanese companies either setting up here to save money or outsourcing to here.
Then I did a start-up in 2002 which didn’t work out because, post-crash, a huge chunk of our market had switched to using India. The solution was to re-train and move up the food-chain.
As each role becomes commoditised, it will move to lower-cost countries and I think that is only fair. One thing that galled me about Live8 was all the “let’s make poverty history” coming from people who the very next day were fighting tooth and nail to keep sugar beet subsidies unchanged thus continuing the impoverishment of sugar cane producers outside the EU.
Smart people will always find ways of specialising and upskilling to stay ahead. I don’t think you are going to have any issues there, Eoghan.
My search for development expertise went from India to Latvia to Poland and ended up in the UK. The right people with the right skills and right attitude at a reasonable price win every time.
BTW, even on Elance, I didn’t go with the cheapest price, I went for a median one with the style that I wanted.
Interesting that an Irish company put in a bid for the work which unfortunately was double everyone else’s.
Hopefully this will be a ten-part post! I’ll keep posting as the adventure continues, both the good and the bad.
Great post Conor, I’m looking forward to seeing the logo. We used elance a few years ago when we got a Russian programmer to do a javascript menu. It worked out well and was good value.
As regards our logo though we just went with Gotlogo.com, “home of the $25 logo”. Ok, they might not be top class but we were quiet happy with results considering what we paid.
I was really using the logo as a test run on Elance and I’m just totally thrilled with the result. I could come up with no changes that I wanted other than the text placement. New site, blog and logo coming hopefully by the end of the week.
So far I’ve had nothing but good experience with people from E-Lance / Rent-a-coder. They’re so good it makes you wonder about the future of the Irish Software industry!
The only caveat that I have is that you *must* be crystal clear in your requirements, and to be able to put all your requirements in writing!
Oops, just put in a comment about Eircom on the post about Elance!
Detailed requirements have always been the long distance challenge. I had a customer in Boston last year who refused to ever write anything down. I had to “interpret” his meaning on multiple phone calls each week. If it wasn’t for the FreeMind mindmapper, the Leo outliner and Valium, I’d never have been able to build his system.
Conor, you’ve given me a lot to think about re outsourcing abroad and services as a commodity in the global market. Your comments have cleared a couple things up in my head. Cheers! My next outsourcing will be through Elance.
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