Monday, April 30, 2012

How A Boostrapper Sees The World

Two common approaches to developing software: (a) hire an offshore team, (b) hire local. (a) is cheap, but has the potential for fatal communication gaps. (b) is often smoother, but is also typically quite a bit more expensive. What do you? Well, it's easy to throw your hands up and just not take any action. But, in a recent article about Klout, I learned about an option (c):

Once [Fernandez of klout.com] figured out a few basic principles, Fernandez hired a team of Singaporean coders to flesh out his ideas. Then, realizing the 13-hour time difference would impede their progress, he offshored himself. For four months, he lived in Singapore, sleeping on couches or in his programmers’ offices. On Christmas Eve of 2008, back in New York a year after his surgery, Fernandez launched Klout with a single tweet.

Amazing, right? He managed to find low cost programmers and get a high degree of communication; all it took was completely throwing out the most common models for getting software built.

I'm not suggesting that you need to move to some foreign land to get your software idea built, just that it's all about mindset and being creative.

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