dgildeh's blog

It’s been a long time coming, but finally my two business partners,  Ale and Clarence, have taken the big leap to join SambaStream full time, leaving their full time jobs in Accenture. To celebrate, we took this photo in front of an Accenture Tiger Woods poster in St. Pancras. No longer will we all be able to walk through airports and say we work for the company on all the posters, but perhaps one day we'll be able to walk past some of our own posters and say we actually founded that company ;)

The last couple of days I’ve been at Olympia in London for the Business Start-up event 2008. Every year thousands of people interested in or presently running a business descend on the event to see 100’s of exhibitors offering services and seminars with some well known UK entrepreneurs. I managed to pop in to see Levi Roots (check out the photo left, his Reggae Reggae sauce is actually pretty good!) and James Caan from Dragons Den. But to be honest they were there for more inspiration rather than useful information on starting a business.

The one seminar that did stand out for me, was by One Fish Two Fish, a marketing agency that helps businesses with their marketing strategy. Their seminar was about marketing to businesses, something particularly interesting to me because of SambaStream. They have a free eBook you can download from their site with a lot of good material so check it out.

For businesses planning to exhibit next year, one piece of advice I got from another SaaS start-up promoting themselves there, was that the people on Friday tend to be the serious buyers and leads, whereas a lot of the people on Saturday were just people thinking of starting a business and probably not good leads to follow up on for a while.

Today I went with my business partner Clarence to a FREE full day seminar on starting a business by the Enfield Enterprise agency. It’s not the first one of these types of events I’ve been too, the government sponsors loads of these agencies to promote entrepreneurship and support new businesses through their critical first few years. In addition to the British Library, Business Link, and other government initiatives, we also have very favourable tax and laws for starting up businesses in the UK.

For example, in the UK I don’t have to ask any permission to start a business, I just have to declare within 3 months I’m self employed, or register a limited company, and until I hit £67,000 a year in revenues, I don’t even have to worry about VAT. Compare this to Spain, where you have to register for VAT from day 1, and on top of that 13 other agencies before you’re even allowed to start trading, or France, where the town mayor has to approve all new businesses, which is difficult to get if him or his family have a competing business, the UK is really easy to just get up and trading!

All in all, I’m really starting to appreciate the UK as a great place to start a business. You have no excuses if you really want to start one here!

It is with great pleasure today we finally got our site, http://www.sambastream.com up online! Small steps towards something much bigger! For those of you that don't know, I left my job with Accenture in July to found a start-up with 2 workmates, let me take some time to introduce you to our team and what we do.

After months of waiting and speculation, my favourite to win the US elections, Barack Obama, HAS WON!! I've been following him closely since I was working in the US (Baltimore, MD) earlier this year and my co-worker Sri, who was one of his biggest supporters in Seattle, kept going on about him and how great he was! I wrote a blog here on why I though he should win and what he should do to make the world a better place back in January, and was fortunate to see him speak live in Baltimore in February (see here). He definitely is very charismatic and inspiring, and most importantly SMART (not retarded like GW Bush) but I guess now we will have to see if he can live up to his hype. He has a tough ride ahead; a world economy tumbling, 8 years of damage to repair after the worst, most retarded world leader ever to get elected (but like my Murphy's, I'm not bitter :p) and a huge amount of foreign government borrowing (I believe is or is projected to reach 60% of GDP).

Anyway, I wish him all the best, while I may not be America's biggest fan, a well run and prosperous America is essential for the rest of us.

Tonight I presented at the Drupal for NGO's event in London that I go to sometimes. Its basically an event to connect Drupal developers to NGOs so us developers can help NGO's build sites and online applications (using Drupal of course). Obviously with my Accenture Development Partnerships background, this is of great interest to me, especially as I am probably the only consultant in Accenture to ever deliver 2 Drupal projects while I was working there for Ashoka and EITI. While you can checkout the EITI site on the link provided, we actually built another site for Ashoka (not their main one) to connect social investors to social entrepreneurs around the world, kind of like a social networking tool with a greater purpose than photo sharing!

Attached is the presentation I did in PDF format (crap quality as I use cutePDF which puts a line through everything) which should explain the project and how we went about building it in Drupal. Interestingly for this project, we needed to connect to another database where all the profile data was stored so that the profile data could be shared with other sites Ashoka plans to do in the future. The site also includes Google Maps integration for plotting fellows on maps in search results and profile pages.

In the project, my part was acting as project lead, acting as technical architect and project manager overseeing and training our excellent team in Bangkok! Because the site hasn't gone live yet and is under test I used screenshots to present the site, but hopefully by the time you read it, the site will be up and running properly here: http://e2e.ashokalab.org.

Finally I've managed to find the time to put up my presentation from Barcamp London last month in the EBay offices in Richmond. It was a fantastic day, and I'm fortunate that my good friend Josh Lui from Minutebox was there to let me know it was happening last minute and get me on the list to turn up!

For those of you who don't know Barcamp (and while I'd heard my Thai developers mentioning the one in Bangkok, I too was also unfamiliar until recently), its basically a geek meetup where lots of developers get together and do presentations to each other on anything they want to talk about. Usually this is about some web development technology, but there are no rules to what you can talk about, just as long as you don't use Barcamp to promote your own business and products. One woman spoke about how to disguise your online identity so you could blog anonymously online. This included fake postal addresses, temporary phone numbers and other counter-measures. Sounded like she was living the life of Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory!

Well being a technology geek, but also a business geek, I decided to talk about my favourite subject, which I feel qualified to talk about after working for Accenture doing exactly that, how to sell software to enterprises. I entitled it "Getting my really really cool software into enterprises". Now I know in many of the start-up events I go to, this would usually get a lot of interest, but to a bunch of tech. geeks, who were more interested in the latest development technologies, I only managed to scrape together a small handful of people to my presentation :p

Anyway,  attached to this page is the presentation in PDF format (sorry for the poor quality, I'm using cutePDF which for some reason puts a line through all my slides!), I removed the Gartner stuff for copyright reasons, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting. The key messages to take away are:

Recently I've met a number of start-ups who've spent lots of time and money building a custom solution for their new website or web application!  Not everyone knows about web technology the way a Geek like me does, so hopefully I'll catch you in time before you go to another developer offering you a custom solution! This is the worst mistake you can do and will result in a lot of extra work and other problems down the line for the following reasons:

• Re-inventing the wheel: Why spend all that time and money building a site that an existing CMS (like Drupal) can deliver out of the box?! So many custom sites I've seen recently are full of features like user management that are standard functionality on any semi-decent CMS! Don't waste your time, build on an existing CMS every time!
• Vendor Lock-In: Imagine you build a custom site that from now to eternity, you were always forced to go back to the original developer to get fixes and new features? That's what so many custom website developers do, great for them, bad for you! You could always get another developer to trawl through the code and pick it up, but you've just wasted a couple of weeks for them to get up to speed when they could have been developing!
• Security: The fact is, any site you put on the web is public and open to attacks. Unless the developer has tested every single use case and feature on the site (very unlikely!) there will be holes in your site open for attack! By building on an existing platform, whether open-source or not, you are building on a system that is used on potentially thousands of other sites, all submitting issues to the developers to fix. After time, your custom developer is going to fall behind maintaining the system, and all the other custom systems they developed!

A few people say they are developing something so unique they had to go the custom route. When I finally see what it is that is so unique about their site, I'm usually shown a pretty standard site with one killer feature! Killer features are essential for making your site stand out above the noise, but trust me, all that time you wasted building the custom backend to support that killer feature, could have been done out of the box in hours, not weeks! While I am biased about Drupal, I honestly believe there is not one website or web application that could not be developed using the CMS! So take my advise - install it and then concentrate your time and money building the custom features that make it unique!

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! :)