| Have you fully quantified the risk and the reward? If not, that's your first priority. Here is some food for thought: 1. If you farm out your website, there is a significant risk that you will spend some or all of the $30K and it will not come out the way you want or even be useable. Ensure you go with a reputable firm with a portfolio of sites that you can actually check out yourself. This is not the time to farm out an idea to a freelance programmer no matter how good s/he is. Just trust me on this (I was once of those freelance programmers!). 2. If things turn out not so bleak from having outsourced the work, chances are that it will be over budget and late. So ensure you have contingency plans (e.g., maybe it will take 1 year instead of 4 months, and $60K instead of $30K to get done). 3. If you aren't in a startup hub, and you aren't in a program like startup school, then your support system is going to be essentially non-existent. This is a very very bad thing. I tried to start a business right out of school in such a situation (and with the tech economy in the gutter) and let me tell you it was very difficult. I got a salaried job for a few years to re-group and am back on my own two feet. You will want to seek out lots of mentors (not online, I mean people you can phone up, have meals with to chat, etc.) and do lots of networking. And even then it might not be enough. One of the great things about being in a place where there's lots of business going on is that you can't go very far without randomly bumping into folks that you might be able to help. For instance, I did a presentation last Friday and afterward two great things happened: i) A gentleman introduced himself as somebody who worked for the investment arm of the biggest bank in Canada and asked me if I'd be interested in partnering on a project with them. Just right out of the blue. I didn't have to do anything and in fact wasn't even shopping my company around. I was just there to present the results of a project we did for a client. ii) One of the directors on the board of my client company spoke about a PR campaign that he was initiating and I soon realized that another company that I've worked with would be an amazing fit for him to partner with. Afterwards, I approached him, told him about that company, we exchanged cards and he asked me to email him with the details. Basically, this sort of thing is bound to happen a lot less frequently in smaller communities (in both overall population and in terms of industry size). You would be surprised how much businesses rely on luck. Luck really is the intersection where preparedness meets opportunity. If you're in a big city that has a lot of folks doing what you're doing, then a lot of times opportunities just randomly present themselves like they did last Friday for me (and my friends at that other company). It's just statistics. |