| I have used an offshore developer to help with some specific projects on my startup that is entering our friends and family launch this week. My experience has been fantastic. I learned to code last fall and consider myself to be a semi-technical founder (php - laravel, jquery). I live in a small town in Montana and I knew I could not complete my MVP entirely by myself. With nearly no developers in my town I knew I would be working with someone over the internet to complete some of the project features. I talked with roughly 10 freelance developers (half in U.S, one in Denmark, one in Belgium and a few in India). I chose one of the developers in India because he seemed like the most capable of the group and immediately understood the project. He has been fantastic to work with and taken "ownership" in the project. I wouldn't hesitate to hire him full time if the project gains steam and he was willing to move to the U.S. A couple of things to note: I would have much rather had an in house developer, but that just wasn't an option in my rural location. Also, my project is a marketplace of sorts, so it isn't a very complicated project from a coding standpoint. Going into this project with no sense of what I was after or how it would get done would have been a horrible idea, regardless of where the developer was located. I had the offshore developer work on very specific modules that were organized through a shared trello board. Before I talked with him, I knew exactly what I wanted him to work on and the timeline for each project. He works some odd hours, so our usual schedule of talking was around 10am - noon and 9pm - 11pm. He spent about 110 hours total on the project. |
My questions, specifically due to common complaints:
Where did you find the 10 leads? What were your criteria?
How did you, as a semi-technical cofounder, interview/approve him?
How do you guys work together regularly?
Finally, if you're willing to share, what's the rate at which he is employed?