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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?"
Find some people that are out of work and willing to work for a share of the eventual profits. Have them develop the code, then when it's working, file chapter 11, and sell the assets off to another company (also owned by you) at firesale prices. Bingo, you get your software development done cheap! Think it's funny? You'd be suprised how many times this has actually been done!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This is easy. Sign up at rentacoder.com and put your job out there. Dozens of software teams from South America, Russia, Romania, India, etc. will bid competitively for your work, offering to do it for a pennies on the dollar. rentacoder holds your money in escrow until the job is done according to your spec. rentacoder manages any arbitration should things go wrong. I've been very happy with rentacoder and the talent I've found out there, and no I dont work for them.
Vonnegut was right: Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, "It might have been."
That, of course, is the issue, and what elevates this post (in my mind, at least) above an ad. You don't seem to want someone who can build you a particular widget, you seem to want a partner that will assume some of the risk of launching a venture. And that is a very, very different thing. Craig's List is full of crap from people who have a great idea... "all we need is all of that other stuff, and a website, and we'll be rich. Wanna do the website?"
My advice: "unask the question". You really seem to want a partner. You're concerned with managing timing, cost-overruns, etc., and clearly don't have the finances to build a company to keep that in house. So, you need to sell your idea to someone who does have the resources and ability to share the risk. Think of this as low-end VC. How does one get (low end) VC? Go sell it to people.
Like I said, if you want code in exchange for money, sure, we'll give you whatever you want, it will be priced fairly, delivered on time, and be generally well done. You can get this from a lot of places (although I must say we provide nice perks for using us, and we write *excellent* code.). If this is your angle, lots of people can give you what you want, and analysing who is best to provide it is a business decision. Weigh cost vs. expected outcome, based on the history of the vendor. Ask for references. When you pick someone, stay on top of the process while it is going on, and don't be afraid of calling bullshit when you see it. Also, don't call bullshit when something isn't. Make sure that changes don't derail the project.
Simple, right?
There's the problem.
I forget what 8 was for.
Here's what I would do:
Hire a couple people who have experience with extreme programming (XP). They'll deliver exactly what you want, without bugs*, with a release every week.
You tell them the most important things to do, and they'll do them in order of your priority (not some made-up technical priority). They won't do other things that they think are nice, just the parts that you ask them for. Hopefully, you'll ask them for only what is needed for your demos.
The weekly releases are key; you can see exactly what's happening. You don't have to wait 6 months to find out that the program doesn't really work, or doesn't do what you want it to do. You'll also quickly get a usable program that does the few things that you need to demo. If at that point you realize that your product idea wasn't so hot after all, you've just saved a lot of money over what you would have spent if you hired a team that wanted to spend all kinds of time creating a flowery design and building infrastructure.
As far as hiring XP types, try to find a local XP person who is well-respected and ask him or her for some leads. Maybe get a technical friend to help interview the programmers. But be sure to hire people who have experience working this way. You don't want to pay them to learn how do release software incrementally.
(*By "without bugs", I mean "without known bugs". Lots of people write software and leave a lot of bugs in until the end. That hurts demos. XP people will fix buggy code as soon as they see it. And they'll write automated tests to make sure that bug never shows up again.)