outsource to india

jetjockey

Hello,

Can anyone recommend a company in india to build a classified ads website ?

Thanks

MeWantBroadband

No.

Crazy idea: how about doing it in Ireland?

Otherwise, try asking on http://www.boards.in

jetjockey

To be honest it is a crazy idea.Costs from 10 to 30 k.

Just at a glance it seems far cheaper in india.

Problem is finding a reputable company !

conor.hogan.2

It is cheaper for a reason, usually.

Beano

jetjockey wrote: »

To be honest it is a crazy idea.Costs from 10 to 30 k.

Just at a glance it seems far cheaper in india.

Problem is finding a reputable company !

cheaper in the short term or the long term?

Fast, Cheap, Good, pick any two.

The_Thing

A friend of mine was a project manager for AIG in Australia, they regularly outsourced their development work to India.

I was speaking to him before Christmas about an idea he had for his own startup and he said it'd cost him around €5,000 to outsource to India.

I'll try and get some details for you, OP.

jetjockey

cheers for the replies.

I think I can get a decent site built for alot less.I have put out a few feelers in india america and uk for the job.
They have all come in alot cheaper.
Surely they cant be that bad ?

Beano

jetjockey wrote: »

cheers for the replies.

I think I can get a decent site built for alot less.I have put out a few feelers in india america and uk for the job.
They have all come in alot cheaper.
Surely they cant be that bad ?

yes they can. unless you can specify EXACTLY, and i do mean exactly, what you want you will be very disappointed. down to the smallest detail. in advance. and even if you do get something that "works" the code will be crap and unmaintainable. thats something that a lot of people dont even consider.

How much development experience do you have? the more experience you have the better chance you have.

John_Mc

Beano wrote: »

yes they can. unless you can specify EXACTLY, and i do mean exactly, what you want you will be very disappointed. down to the smallest detail. in advance. and even if you do get something that "works" the code will be crap and unmaintainable. thats something that a lot of people dont even consider.

How much development experience do you have? the more experience you have the better chance you have.

Have to agree with this. I've worked with offshore development teams and you really really need to micromanage everything. India in particular is a problem because their culture is to never question anything. If they see a gaping hole in the requirements and know that there's a serious issue, they will not say it to you.

It might be a lot cheaper but you could well up spending just as much getting a full technical specification and design implemented correctly. You'll lose a lot of hair too.

longhalloween

Why don't you take the ryanair option and get some IT students to do it for you?

tricky D

This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

From your very basic OP, it does not sound like you have done enough research into classifieds site development. If you had, you have found information on plugins and other packaged solutions already out there. If you had searched around boards, you would have found out about pricing models, scalability, and many other aspects, but most importantly, the massive failure rates of these ventures. You have to get all this right before you start, otherwise the venture will barely get off the ground after wasting many months on it.

It is worth restating that there is a massive project managmement overhead to out-sourcing to India and if you do not have a full spec, your solution will end up with big holes in it, endangering your business. The project management overhead isn't often appreciated enough so you end up getting hit by opportunity costs (your time and time spent waiting for you to get to market) which make the outsourcing uneconomic.

The few really successful sites of this type have invested at least six-figure sums in the development of their ventures and have considerable existing brand equity, first-to-market advantage, high value niche/USP and/or plenty of finance. The marketing costs are also huge. If you are trying to get by on a development budget as low as you seem be, then I fear that your marketing will not be properly factored in.

I don't mean to too harsh, but if you do not know exactly what you are doing and haven't done lots of research or spoken to the people behind the successful ones, do not do it.

longhalloween wrote: »

Why don't you take the ryanair option and get some IT students to do it for you?

You don't really believe what MOL said about that. There's a thread from a few years ago somewhere which laid that myth bare.

DublinWriter

Surely there's free open source software or the likes of Vbulletin (used by Boards and Adverts) that only costs a couple of hundred.

Hire a web site admin to set the above up for you. It should only take a couple of days to set up technically.

tricky D

DublinWriter wrote: »

Surely there's free open source software or the likes of Vbulletin (used by Boards and Adverts) that only costs a couple of hundred.

Hire a web site admin to set the above up for you. It should only take a couple of days to set up technically.

There are indeed. I alluded to them in my post, but the OP hasn't done near enough research and found them.

lowlifer

My advice would be to stay away from Indian companies. As everyone's said, it's cheaper, but the quality will be crap and you will end up with an unmaintainable project.

There are freelancing teams made up of full time developers who want something aside from their day job. Not advisable if you're on a tight schedule, but the costs and quality could be neat.

Don't advise looking farther (to the East) than Europe. I doubt you could fly over to India for a visit.

gargoylee

Try some of the freelancing websites to get a competitive bid. You'll get people and companies from around the world. Most of the websites have a reputation system in place so that you can get some sort of assurance that you're getting the quality you pay for.

Some examples:

www.vworker.com
www.freelancer.com
www.guru.com
www.elance.com

Good luck.

The Corinthian

jetjockey wrote: »

Surely they cant be that bad ?

Actually many of them are very competent and talented - but competent and talented does not guarantee a good result.

Outsourcing can work well, but you have to remember that management of outsourced resources, especially in the developing World, requires specific skills, otherwise (as John_Mc pointed out above), you're won't be happy with the end result and it will ultimately cost you more much to get it done right.

There are various reasons for this; meaning is often lost or distorted when there's no face to face meetings (Skype only goes so far), and the level of English is not always the best or most comprehensible. Then there are cultural differences that you have to be aware of. And finally they have to be both capable and professional.

All of this means that even if they are both capable and professional, it's useless unless you can both read from the same page.

As such, if you have no experience in outsourced project management and analysis, I recommend you bring someone in who does to act as an analyst for you locally and to manage the outsourced team.

longhalloween wrote: »

Why don't you take the ryanair option and get some IT students to do it for you?

You mean pay some students £12k for a HTML brochureware site, then a consultancy firm £1m for the back-end booking engine? Sure, real smart.