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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?"
Why would you want to (essentially) outsource development of your idea? You may not be the greatest coder in the world, but you should be able to put together something by yourself. If it's a large enough project that it might take 2-3 additional people plus you a number of months to complete, then start your company, find those people, sell them on the idea, and get them to come work for you in a startup capacity - reduced or no salary, stock or option grants, etc. in return for shared responsibility in creating the company.
Face it - a consultant or contractor is only obligated to give you what you've contracted for, and is probably going to be more than happy to eat up your cash reserves by working extra hours to fix bugs, meet demo deadlines, etc. His/her reward is relatively small, and effort is commensurate. Someone sharing responsibility with you for putting out the product will be a lot more motivated (by a greater reward, and a greater risk) to provide whatever effort is needed to get the product out and get money rolling in ASAP - presumably your desire as well.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
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