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Software Prototypes into Finished Products?
blastedtokyo asks: "With all the talk of offshoring and outsourcing, it seems that taking an entrepreneurial route is a great way to take your life out of the hands of overpaid goons and put it squarely in the hands of an underpaid one. Without an organized team of coders, testers, and designers it seems very tough for a single person to get started in anything other than consulting, or selling stuff on eBay. With my background in product design, and my knowledge that my coding skills aren't the greatest, I'd like to find a vendor or team to help develop some software ideas that I've been stewing over for a while. In other words, I've got the business plan, some credit-cards ready to be maxed out, the bitmap-demo and the specs for a few possible projects, but would like to get a team to code up a working prototype suitable to get some initial customer evaluations. Does anyone have experience sourcing such a vendor? How would you interview a firm to know that their staff is easy to work with and competent? Is it possible to do something like this without delays, excessive mis-communications and cost overruns, or is it better to just start hiring contractors, one at a time?"
Go to Rentacoder.com and the similar sites. Prepare for some interesting experiences.
You will loose your shirt, by the way. The guys who do independent software projects, the kind that are sold shareware or download-register, all write the stuff themselves to start out. And some of them have worse coding skills than you, believe me.
Hi. First a bit about me and my firm (not a plug--we're too busy to take on random work and we're probably not in your region), then the free advice. I own an 8 person (and growing :) software engineering consultancy that does project planning and software development for new products in the embedded and distributed application spaces.
We specialize in a few different types of work for small firms and billion dollar companies. Man/machine interfaces. Medium scale (5 to 500 end points) distributed soft real time data gathering and collaborative apps. Hard real time embedded consumer and diagnostic devices. To give you some idea, over the last 10 years we've worked with x86, PIC, 8051, etc. using VxWorks, Win*, SCO, FreeBSD, Linux, PalmOS. Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server dbs, C, C++, Java, Perl, etc. A wide variety.
The advice: don't try to farm the project out. Find a firm that has experience using the tools you need to have used doing the kind of work you need to have done. Make sure that their management team and engineering staff are the same ones that worked on prior, sucessful projects like yours will be, and check with their past clients to make sure they did an acceptable job.
Get a project plan from them with a detailed task breakdown (be reasonable about how detailed: don't expect them to make up tasks for things you can't yet spec clearly). Have them identify risks up front and get those tasks moved to the front of the schedule. Make sure you see clear descriptions of architecture--vague descriptions and diagrams are a good sign that they don't get it yet. Make sure you or somebody you trust technically reviews their work.
Once hired, visit them frequently throughout the process. Assuming you don't have an airtight spec, you'll want to work on site as much as you can or have them work on your site--rent space in an incubator or industrial park or even a house, but get you and them and everyone you can to work in the same physical space for a good part of each week if not full time.
You can try to get them to take equity, but sucessful firms generally avoid doing that unless you or your advisors have a really good track record, a solid bplan, etc., etc. If they're eager to take equity, then they may be starving. If they're good, that's ok, but it's often a sign of desparados.
Good luck--you've chosen a hard path, but it's a lot of fun and hopefully you'll do well at it.
- Barrie
The exact law depends on the state, but the term "piercing the corporate veil" is the legal term for the approach used to defeat this scam in court. Anyone who transfers ownership of an asset from himself to himself via the game you cite risks having the court declare the corporations to be merely "veils" and the real party to the dispute to be the party behind the veils. Once that ruling has been made, the plaintiffs can sue the owner of the corporation directly.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
To clarify a few points, here's a little more background. First, I'm definately planning on hanging on to the project management/specs and not farming that out. I'm looking to outsource the coding because 1) I suck at it and 2) it's not what gets me excited. At my old day jobs, I worked side by side with great coders and while I know I probably couldn't afford any of them on a full time basis, I'd be doing a huge disservice to string together crud that I wrote. For me the thrill is putting a useful product in people's hands, growing a business, creating a great place to work and finding ways to do it on a shoestring.
Second, as my handle indicates, I'm physically located in Tokyo. As a person of mediocre Japanese skills and western upbringing, finding local help at a rate that I can afford is tough. Working with someone remotely is possibly easier than working with someone locally. I'm expecting to relocate somewhere else in the world as this project grows but to get started initially I just wanted something that could be use to gauge (business) customer interest. At this point, showing off my Flash demos draws a lot of friendly "well that looks great, come back when you have something real" remarks. I'm looking to have something that people could quickly try it out on their systems for a few days and either call me a complete moron or tell me they might be able to work with me, partner up, etc. In other words, I'm looking for the proverbial proof of concept.
Third, I'm curious about people who have suggested giving up equity in an early stage like this. I've always heard that one of the biggest mistakes of small businesses is giving up equity too early and too generously. While I realize I have little else (cash) to give, I figure it's not something to be casually thrown about, especially if someone that I ultimately have trouble working with ends up with a significant equity stake and demands to have his share bought out.
Fourth, as far as an open source business model goes, I'd like to go that route in finding lots of grassroots help but I worry that would eliminate any advantage I had in building a business. For example, let's say I put the idea out in the public domain and managed to get 15 people interested in working (part time of course) on a GPLed version of it. If/when the project became usable by customers, there's nothing to prevent a better funded firm (like IBM) from bundling it into part of their solution offering and becoming the de facto commerical support vendor for the product.
Finally, for those of you who wish me failure and call me gutless for not writing it myself, I have no doubt that this is no sure thing. It's exactly the reason I'm looking for contractors or oursourcing firms. It'd be downright irresponsible for me to start interviewing full time employees, hire a handful of them but know that I'd only be able to pay them for a few months before running out of cash if there were significant delays, negative customer response, etc.