Hey Gio

We tried it and left a terrible taste in our mouth. Our idea was simple yet out of the box. It could solve the problems of savvy online marketers and it gave large corporations opportunities to enter new markets.

It was a project that will take time, effort and capital to build. Although we had the money to build this idea, we lacked manpower.

How it all began

One of our contacts pitched his service as a “broker” of outsourcing development projects to India. We gave them a clear and concise set of instructions. They claimed to be competent and familiar doing such projects so we hired them. The contract stated that the project will be completed in 3 months with 3-4 employees on board. When the due date neared, technical problems occurred. A month later, we were assured that the project will be complete in a few more months.

Recently, we sent our contact an email to find the current status of the project since they were already 3 months over due. To our shock, the broker fired the programmers that worked on our project due to their incompetence - That was it!!!

If we didn’t request a status update, we never would have known that our project was abandoned. After wasting 6 months of our time and quite a bit of capital, we received nothing. If we were to hire another team of programmers, they would probably want to start from scratch and not continue on what little the outsourcing company provided.

Aside from this loss, we’ve also had unsatisfactory results from outsourcing to individuals from a foreign country.

If you want to consider outsourcing your projects, learn from our mistakes and do the following:

1. Conduct intensive research on the outsourcing company. Ask them a lot of questions and also contact a few of their past clients to know more about their performance and habits.

2. Deal with companies directly and not through a commission based broker. Should you consider working with a broker, make sure they have been in the field for a number of years. Don’t work with people who are new at brokering outsourcing projects because their lack of experience will be at your expense.

3. Have an iron clad contract

4. Be careful when hiring individuals. Make sure you’re confident with their competency and communication before assigning them work. It also helps to start out with smaller projects.

5. Only hire programmers full time after they have performed well doing contract work first.

On a positive note, projects we have outsourced on American shores outperformed offshore outsourcing

My parents enrolled me to take private piano lessons when I was 5. It was fun and I learned how to read basic music. But years after that, without practice and application, I forgot everything.

I heard the song Bullet the Blue Sky by U2 in 1988 so I got my dad to buy me the Joshua Tree cassette tape. I enjoyed it a lot but it wasn’t until Achtung Baby that made me a hard core U2 fan. I went ahead and bought all their albums. At the time, War became my favorite and the guitar riffs led me to buying a guitar when I was in the 8th grade. It was a crappy, generic electric that came with an amp that buzzed a lot so I hardly used it.

The first tune I learned to play was Sunday Bloody Sunday from reading tablature. It was fairly easy to learn. I got more tablature books by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Dire Straits.

I lost interest in playing the guitar by my sophomore year in high school.

10 years later in 2005, I bought an acoustic Ibanez guitar. I felt the need to rekindle what I enjoyed doing in the past and also learning to read music.