Pre-Production...

A one man start-up team is hard and it is one that usually fails; but sometimes there simply is no choice in the matter. While I am bouncing some ideas off a couple of my trusted friends, I really wanted to see if I can take this project on by myself without burning out or losing interest. Again, the end goal for me is to have something people will use and find helpful. It's be great if a lot of people end up recommending it but that would really just be icing on the cake.

So in the last couple of weeks, things have been progressing forward nicely. I found a logo designer from guru.com as well as found someone in India who actually showed some great examples of xhtml/css work to do the layout. Unfortunately the last time I outsourced to India the project did not come back to scope nor did it ever get completed. A few thousands of dollars later, it became a really bad and costly lesson. However, I am hoping for a different outcome this time.

Since the last project, I've done some research on how to manage outsourced teams. The common theme I heard is outsourcing is great for small projects but not so great when it comes to large, complex projects.

I think the key point here and one that I'm about to confirm, is that the project must be split up into tiny chunks and numerous milestones so that the hired help will stay in scope. It's not a matter of incompetency... but rather all contractors in any industry have their own on-the-job experiences and of course, pride. I think secretly everyone thinks they can do a better job than what was instructed by their client; myself included.

Therefore, if you are a stickler for doing something to your exact specifications even when you don't know what that is, then don't throw up a cloud of ideas and expect them to read your mind. If you throw them a large project w/o explicit details, then your dev. team will most likely definitely take a creative spin on their interpretation. To make sure you don't burn your developers and yourself out, break the pieces up and set tiny milestones. Is the registration form correct? check, Is the error checking performing to spec? check, etc.

Also, instead of hiring a one stop shop that does everything from logo to back-end development, hire the best of who you can find for each piece of the puzzle and get the BEST out of the different contractors for each part. No one has ever said "hey that java expert is an AWESOME logos/brand expert!" and vice versa, no one ever said a designer is a great .net developer. I don't even think they use the same part of the brain!

But anyway, the logo for the most part is done and I'm anxiously awaiting on the design comp for the layout. In the meantime, I need to find other developers to tie the back end to the layout as well as finding a java programmer to code a photo upload util or find me one. Photos... everybody loves em but they sure are annoying to code for sometimes.