David Gildeh

Recently I've met a lot of start-ups asking me about offshoring because of my freelancing model. For those of you who aren't aware of what I do, part time I freelance for start-ups and other companies developing Drupal sites (because Drupal is amazing and can do everything!) Because I wanted to keep it part time I decided to go for an offshore model with my self providing the in-depth onshore expertise and project management (and getting the work) and then offshoring to a firm in Pune, India, that I met the founder of (very cool guy) while I was working in India a few months ago. It also has the additional benefits of working out much cheaper for the start-ups as their rates are about 1/6 of mine!

A lot of people are nervous about offshoring, and understandably, there are a lot of horror stories out there. But I believe with some best practices I've learnt over the past 2 years offshoring in both Thailand and India, it is a very viable route to go, especially when cash is tight, just as long as you follow a few simple rules.

First of all you have to appreciate the cultural differences when offshoring. Not only is it a difference in mannerisms, its also a difference in exposure to the same things we get here in the UK. For example, you may go to a developer in the UK and explain your really cool idea for an eCommerce site like Amazon.com, but then go to India and find half the people have never used or even heard of Amazon.com. This makes a big difference when working offshore, and generally the test when picking an offshore firm/developers to work with is ask them to list both the sites they've developed but also more importantly the sites they use daily for themselves! You know if a developer says he uses Twitter everyday, this is a proper web geek who's immersed in the Web 2.0 culture, because while we may hear about Twitter or similar services everyday, its basically unheard of in the rest of the world! This is the main reason why people find it hard working with offshore developers, because they just don't "get" the concept of your site, and as a result take longer getting up to speed and also find it hard to add any value to your service like some of the creative London developers can who understand your concepts and come up with great ideas to make it better! I'm hoping with my freelance model, to get the best of both worlds, with me providing the insight and creativity, and India doing what they're good at - developing quality code cost effectively! Saying that, you may be surprised how versed some of the firms out there are, definitely the firm I'm using is exposed on a daily basis to cutting edge sites and understands the space we work in, so look hard and you will find diamonds in the rough...

The second cultural differences are mannerisms. One thing that is common in most Asian countries, is hierarchy. You're the client, so you are king, and they have to make you happy even if its impossible. That means when they say Yes, it doesn't always mean yes, you have to figure out if they really mean "yes we can do it by tomorrow" or "yes we'll try our best". Usually you can tell I find by how positive the response is, really positive (definitely yes) means yes, not so positive (sure, we'll do our best) means you'll have to give them more time. While different countries vary, what is common among all these countries is if you get them to explain back to you what you just said and they say it back perfectly, you're probably OK.  (see how I said probably, which means good but chance it may not be, that's what you have to look out for!) Don't expect them to be direct like we are in the west and just say NO!

Another thing to take into account is time-zones. While India and the UK is an acceptable 4.5 hours time difference, if you offshore to the far east (where the developers are excellent!) you will have a less acceptable 8-12 hours time difference. Basically when you start work, they finish! Without overlap you won't be able to chat and sort out any questions or issues in real time. Also you have to think about time zones in everything you plan other than meetings, like deliverables. If you have to provide an urgent design spec for Thursday, you actually need to finish it Wednesday night, as by the time you wake up on Thursday and send it over, even if first thing, India has just wasted half a day waiting around for you to send it! Unproductive time that adds up over the project and causes delays! Fortunately most offshore firms understand they have to work around the onshore team (client) rather than the other way around so most will stay late in the office to have meetings and overlap. Another thing to solve this issue is work in a closer time zone, Eastern Europe also has some very low cost developers who are only 2-3 hours and an £80 flight away if you need to visit. Something to bear in mind if this is a real issue for you!

So when setting up an offshore project this is all the things I require to ensure the project runs effectively:

The most important two things to take away from this is accountability and transparency. You need to make the offshore team accountable by setting CLEAR expectations upfront and having a point of contact who can make things happen if things screw up, and also transparency so you can see everything the team offshore is doing to catch issues early. I usually ask the developers to first do the basic configuration and templating for Drupal, so the client can see the site as it will look as soon as possible and then add the development on top of that as it becomes ready. This allows for a semi-Agile development process that keeps things on track and even saves time on testing and bug fixing later down the line. While it can be risky to show the client things before they're ready, as long as you set their expectations clearly that they're seeing it as-is and untested, most clients would prefer to see the status of development visually just by going to the development site.

Lastly, status reporting. We use daily status reports from the developer saying what was done that day, any issues, what is planned for tomorrow and any questions about the work itself (like how some feature is supposed to work). Followed by daily chats on Skype/MSN, and weekly/bi-weekly conference calls, you can keep a track on whats going on, close issues fast, and most importantly actually feel like you're working together instead of two anonymous parties who've never met! Some of the offshore developers are actually very cool and you may even become friends!

Anyway, I think that sums it up for now. Overall its like anything "new". I'm comfortable because I've done it for 2 years now, seen it work and know the mistakes that can happen. Other people just can't imagine working with people in another time zone, country and culture, and for that there's people like me to provide the best of both worlds and hand hold them while they take their first steps into offshoring...once you start you'll never go back! :) 

Yesterday, I walked past an O2 store that had iPhone 3Gs in stock (a rare event these days!), so on impulse, because I'd already been drawn in by their sexiness and my friends who had one couldn't stop going on about them, I decided it was finally time to buy one.

My disappointment started as soon as I went through the small print of the contract (but for some reason didn't stop me signing it!). Below is a summary of my first 24 hours having the much over-hyped iPhone, first the disillusionment, then the frustration, followed by acceptance, then a warm glowing feeling inside...

When I was a kid, I remember watching the Olympics on TV and thinking it was pretty boring. Then in 2004, I went to the Athens Olympics to visit all my friends. I think that's when I finally got what the Olympics was all about! It was amazing! The atmosphere, the parties, produced by all these countries from all over the world coming together to compete. It didn't matter what bull shit had happened before the games between all the countries, everyone was invited and everyone partied hard together! I'll never forget the last night when a small crowd of Brazilians, high on winning their "best" Gold medal for the Mens beach Volleyball that day started a party in Monostiraki Square and ended up with people from all over the world joining in (along with all of us) and just marching up and down drumming and singing!

Now the Olympics has come to Beijing, and after watching the opening ceremony, it really brought back all those memories from the last Olympics. After Athens, we all swore to make it to Beijing, but without the money, and apparently the accommodation (hotels have been booked out for years!) which we didn't have to worry about in Athens because we all lived there (and I just crashed with them!) we couldn't make it, but I doubt we'll have problems making it to London 2012! ;) But after seeing the opening ceremony, I wish I had...it was spectacular! I don't think any country before, and definitely not London in 2012 (sorry, but lets face it, we're not good at being impressive like that!) has done a show like that before, the special effects were amazing! Running around a huge globe sideways, a huge dove created by hundreds of people moving around to flap its wings, over 20,000 fireworks, and I definitely wasn't expecting the Olympic logo that "fell" on the floor like stardust to suddenly rise up and float in the center of the stadium!

This Olympics has been dogged with China's human rights records and Tibet, but I think that for the next 16 days, just like all the other countries leave their BS behind, we should let China temporarily leave its behind. The Chinese people are proud and deserve this dramatic entrance onto the world stage! As much as we can criticise many aspects of China, we could do the same of America, especially its foreign policy the past 8 years, and many other countries. The fact is no country is perfect, no matter how "free" its population. I actually think that the Chinese style government has done more good for China than the democratic alternative that everyone seems to think we should force onto the rest of the world! After spending 2.5months in India, the worlds largest democracy, and similar in population size to China, I realised that democracy may not be the best solution for developing countries. While China has managed it population with one child policy, centralised government and expanding cities as needed to avoid slums, all for the "greater good" rather than individual liberty, it has built fantastic infrastructure, far less poverty and slums than other fast growing developing countries and "democracies" like India and Brazil. Democracy is great when you have a majority comfortable, educated middle class, but when you have basic issues such as giving people food, education and eradicating poverty, democracy slows progress down. Having to worry about your popularity when making decisions usually means you shy away from the hard decisions that need to be made, having to argue for every penny and change just to get things done, and then losing your budget when the next guy gets voted in...that's what has happened in India and why it is years behind in development to China, and although I cannot justify on a moral basis another one child policy, after seeing the thousands of kids in India running around, its worrying how fast their population is growing when they haven't even figured out basic standards for 60% of its population.

Anyway, this is not a rant on India, this is a rant on the critics of China who will surely be trying to taint the events over the next 16 days. While we should not forget the issues in this world and continue to fight them, China has every right to be proud of its achievements, more-so than some developed countries like America can be in recent years, and we should let the events be what they're meant to be - a celebration of all countries achievements, especially China's, so leave the bull shit at the back door.

This morning I went again to OpenCoffee to meet some fellow entrepreneurs, and met Tim from Scene Stealer, who told me about their new online clothes shop where people can pick their size and see a model of the same size wearing the clothes before they purchase. Sounded a lot like the infamous Boo.com that failed in the dot.con boom so I had to check it out!

Their first site is knickerpicker.com,  selling online lingerie, but they will expanding into suitpicker and other related clothes areas in the future. When I saw what they meant by online modelling, a video of the model turning and walking forwards/backwards wearing the lingerie, maybe because of the type of clothing they were modelling, I couldn't help thinking this would be the ULTIMATE online porn application! Tell the girl what to do using the buttons and watch her do it!

Now I know this is not the original intentions of the site, but if the site doesn't pick up like they hope, I definitely think they could make a lot of money in the darker side of the net (which to be honest if prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, porn is the oldest profession on the web!) :) Go check it out and let me know what you think, porn or clothes? Only time will tell...

See below for an embedded example of what I'm talking about!

Today I just received my order of new business cards from VistaPrint. Now they weren't as cheap as the ones they advertise on their site, because I added my own custom logo (my Southpark avatar that I use on this site) and you have to pay almost £6 just for the standard postage! So all in all around £11 for 250 cards which arrived slightly over one week later.

My friend Yuri, who is a graphics designer and is refreshingly very opinionated on anything she doesn't like, thought using my Southpark logo was slightly unprofessional, and also being low resolution wouldn't look that good (agreed but what can you do hey?) and also my slogan "IT Guru for your business" wasn't that serious...

It really depends on how seriously people take business cards, I thought the whole point was so the other person has your contact details not a new piece of artwork to put on their desk, and I think having something a bit different will stand out as I'll usually be handing them out at networking events where everyone will be collecting cards from loads of people, so I think you need something for them to remember, even if the best I could do was a "quirky" slogan! Ideally having a list of services I provide on the back would have been better but I couldn't find that option on VistaPrint to do anything that exciting! Also, hopefully meeting me in person will confirm I'm very professional and capable of helping them with their IT. I didn't put "Web Guru for your business" even though I specialise in the web, because after almost 4 years designing IT systems for large businesses, I also know a lot about setting up servers, networks and other things small businesses might need. My main expertise is in content management, how companies can use software to manage the huge amounts of documents/content they produce over the years and collaborate on them, which is web related, but not always...

Do people really take them so seriously if they're not Asian? I remember from my working over there it was like a religion and the way you took the card, made a point of reading it carefully and didn't put it away until the other person left was all part of the culture! It was very useful in meetings with new people, I could put them all on the table in the same layout as the people sitting around so I never forgot anyone's name, especially helpful when they have a name you can bearly pronounce let alone remember!

Anyway, I like the design, but I do appreciate my eye for this kind of thing tends to be crap, so I'd appreciate any feedback on my new business card (click on the thumbnail above to pop-up the full size version for a closer look!) and also any other mantra on business card etiquette!

Yesterday I stumbled across "Getting Real", a book from 37Signals, the creators of Basecamp and other small business software. You can read it online here. Its a great book, very simple and to the point and goes along very well with the presentation I put on my blog on Start-ups that rely on advertising models only will die, also by one of the guys from 37Signals.

Its got myself and my business partners thinking seriously about the software-as-a-service business model for small businesses, or as 37Signals puts it - the Fortune 5,000,000! The fact is there's a lot of players in this space, but most of them are targeted at the US or western market. Now I don't think we'd start going to developing markets initially (and on the web you potentially target any market that's interested in your product!) but what it means is we're only just seeing the tip of the iceberg of things to come over the next few years! There are a lot of competitors moving in, notably Google, Microsoft & the original pioneer of this space, Salesforce.com, but in a huge market, there's always space for newcomers, and the signs are all coming together to make it even easier for a new start-up to enter the market - good quality open source software like Alfresco to build new applications on, UI frameworks like Google Web Toolkit that allow you to rapidly build dynamic AJAX interfaces, and cloud computing infrastructure from Amazon web services, or a new one which looks far more user friendly, GoGrid.com. The book from 37Signals just tops the cake with a clear path on how to just get out there and do it!

None of this is revolutionary, most of this has been out there for a while and I've been thinking along these lines for the past month while trying to come up with a business idea, but reading the book just made things clearer. Take a look at the book yourself and it may inspire you too! As for our business idea, its too early to discuss it in this post, but I will be formally announcing our new company and product in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space!

Note: I will still be doing freelance consulting on the side so please feel free to contact me if you need my services!

Today I paid my second ever visit to the British Library in St. Pancras, but today I actually signed up! All you need is a picture ID (like drivers license) and a utility bill with your home address (like a phone bill). It takes 15 minutes to register as a reader, you get a card, and you're good to go to access all the reading rooms!

The reason I actually went to sign up was because I'd heard about the Business & IP centre. The centre has workshops for entrepreneurs on different aspects of setting up a business, and also provides a HUGE library of market research reports published in the UK such as Mintel Reports which cost £1000's to buy online if you want them! On top of that the reading rooms are actually really nice to work, and you can take your laptop inside and use the wireless (which unfortunately costs around £5.50 a day but will be free from October!).

There's not many things I get excited about from our public services, but the British Library is fantastic and a great resource for start-ups in the UK! However as usual, the government was planning to cut the budget for the library by 7% last year, which was fortunately revoked as stated here.

For more information you can visit the British Library website here, and there's even a FaceBook group for British Library Entrepreneur and SME Network.

Its a fact - there are more start-ups, more investors and more entrepreneurs out there. Cheap technology, easy access to funding and a general change in our generation's attitude to going it alone means there's never been so much innovation happening in any point of history!

I think the cheap technology has had the biggest impact, back in '95 the cost of buying and setting up servers, hiring developers etc. made it prohibitive without funding. Now I can rent a fully dedicated server for less than £150 (US$300) a month, outsource the development to India and build a start-up on some savings without any VC funding! On top of that, the number of events and organisations promoting entrepreneurship is pushing more people into going it alone and putting them in touch with funding, if needed which a lot may not even need anymore just to get started!

On the flip side of that, it does mean a new entrepreneur like me has immense difficulty finding a genuinely good, original idea! I've been churning hundreds of ideas for the past few months, and almost immediately with one quick Google search I can find a bunch of companies already doing it or something similar! Now that is so easy to try something cheaply, people just go out there and do it, and the big ideas, that have already been thought of, but not implemented because the technology isn't there yet or its too expensive, are out of the range of most entrepreneurs who are not going for funding without a PHD thesis to back them up!

However, the wisdom I have learnt from entrepreneurs I've read/seen online or met is your original idea is almost never what you end up doing once you actually get started developing it. I'm watching myself carefully to ensure I avoid "idea paralysis" - not getting started because I'm waiting for the Eureka idea that hasn't been done before! After a few weeks of in depth market research for several ideas, I've come to accept that very likely any idea I come up with has been thought of or done by someone else, and that by itself does not mean there is no room for improvement or even space for you in the market - the fact is nearly all the new ideas I've thought of and seen are still coming out of Silicon Valley in the US, but 80% of online users are not from the US! There's a whole world out there, and after all my travels I have an insight to always think globally, so just cause there's a small start-up in the US doing what your idea, think how you can adapt the idea for the rest of the world!

I'm currently reading this book (in the thumbnail above), Developing New Business Ideas, to help me put a framework to evaluate my business ideas so I don't go pursuing an idea which is, frankly, crap. The presentation by Paul Saffo below is also very interesting, mainly about how most innovations have been tried 20 years before they become huge hits, again proving your great "new" idea isn't really that original after all!

Fora TV: Paul Saffo - Secret to Effective Forcasting
(For some reason the embedding code they supply doesn't work on my site!)