Perhaps this got traction on HN just because it's against the usual grain here, which focuses on high standards, good design, and taking pride in one's work. But I still don't really get why this post is deserving of the upvotes it got.
Is it really any surprise that you can make lots of money if you use cheap labour, if you're okay with releasing - and perhaps even selling, though I hope not - garbage software ("Release a really crappy version", "I don't spend money on design"), and if you're content without innovating or trying to break new ground?
The world is full of people who do that, and yes, many of them get by just fine, and some make lots of money. But there's far more to life, and work, than that.
For me, that's what's so great about HN: it is full of inspirations for a web developer like myself. Inspirational companies and inspirational people who don't rest until they get it right. Who push the envelope. Who care deeply about the experience of using their software.
This post contains nothing inspirational like that. I've worked for people like this before. Never again.
You seem to be speaking from a professional mind-set, which is perfectionistic. An entrepreneurial mind-set is a little different: why perfect something if no one wants it? Or, as pg says "build something people want". Find out what they want first, then perfect it.
I up voted it because I like the fact that this guy is a realist. So few of us who read HN will touch the heavens above no matter how bright, or thoughtful, or elegant our work might be. Luck and timing have more to do with success than inspiration.
This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here.
Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice.
Yeah, I was expecting to find myself disagreeing with you but I find it a little bleak too. I don't know if it makes me a ridiculous idealist but I do care about doing things to a certain level of quality.
If anyone is looking for tips on working with offshore programmers, read Max's few but timeless points!
He nails his experience about getting designers from Romania. They have really great taste! And Russians for math-related complicated programming. And India for cheap average quality programming work(btw, Indian designers are in general pathetic). These have been my experiences too over 8 years of being on both sides of the outsourcing market(as a freelancer and as someone who has hired folks offshore). It is an art working with people offshore and if you can manage it, it can give you a real edge especially in starting phases.
A company I worked for used a relatively big web company in Romania, hiring a few developers over there to work full time on their site.
The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code.
If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.
Little quiz ... what should set your alarm on? The "big" size of that "web company" or its location?
For me it's a no-brainer ... simply because for a consulting company to scale to that "big" factor ... you need to hire a lot of third-rate, cheap code-monkeys ... that's business 101 ;)
Second of all ... your company should've asked for a portfolio of the actual developers that ended up working for you, simply because the quality of the employees varies greatly even in well-respected organizations.
Or was there some kind of manager acting as a proxy between you and those doing the actual work?
And out of curiosity, in your country there aren't any "big software companies" that are doing consulting work of dubious quality?
This seems to me that it was more a problem with your management. Blaming it on "outsourcing" is not really accurate.
BTW ... in my small company that does consulting work, we aren't taking outsourced projects very often. We don't do it simply because those kind of clients that would outsource to us are of very poor quality, leading to poor communications, unmet deadlines, unmet payments and generally disastrous results.
To clarify, by 'big' i meant not just in size, but in number of highish profile clients.
Towards the end of me being there, they added a more senior developer/manager to the Romanian team -- his code was much better (i.e. not dreamweaver generated HTML/CSS) and was easier to communicate with, but still the code quality from the others on the team was very unmaintainable.
I apologize if it seemed as if I was generalizing the entire country of Romania's programming abilities -- definitely not what I intended. If all the developers were as good as the senior developer added on later, I'm sure it would have went much better.
My main point remains the same though, and I think is one that we can both agree on - that hiring inexpensive labor with only focusing on the front end user experience, without any respect or idea of how well the back end is being constructed is a bad idea. I'm sure outsourcing can work, but only with careful attention to the behind the scenes backend code quality, to ensure the project is not being held together by duct tape.
Yes, quality of code is a huge concern for me which is why I always have a growth plan: if a certain project takes off, I will quickly hire another proven full-time programmer to recode or completely understand the project.
I also am not a huge fan of working with offshore companies. There is enough friction already in talking remotely. I don't like another layer of management in between developers. Though for bigger projects, you need a project manager of some sort.
I feel like there are whole marketplaces I'm not aware of - where do people go to find offshore help? I've universally found poor quality, which ends up with me paying people I know personally a ton of money to grind out boring crap (or doing it myself), when I'd much rather pay them to work on the interesting things.
A lot of it comes from experience. After outsourcing for a year, you can judge pretty accurately within the first paragraph what a person is good for. The way they communicate will tell you a lot.
I always felt like someone should write a quick, to-the-point ebook for outsourcing newbies on working through the outsourcing world. May be I'll pen that one day:)
Zaid - I love your blog so your future ebook will probably be good too. If you have extensive experience outsourcing, I want to learn from your trails. So please do it.
Here are some helpful links to get you started. I'm looking forward to reading your ebook.
One of the things that I really like about HN is that I feel like most of the people here have information worth sharing, and information that's valuable enough that I'd pay for a PDF of that information.
I'm kind of surprised we don't have an HN ebook marketplace going yet, to be honest.
I have done freelance work through oDesk (at one point full-time for a couple months). I see postings looking for programmers where they are willing to pay max $4/hr. I try to move on and not get frustrated but it's difficult.
I would be really interested in hearing just what kind of programmers you hire. From the little you mention, it sounds like you need to treat them like kids/code-monkeys - spelling everything out, not wanting their creativity, etc.
I have thought sometimes to just spend a couple hundred bucks and hire a couple cheap programmers to work on a made-up project just to see what it's like. It would make for an interesting blog post at least.
A lot of it is also expectation control. I am always mentally ready for a programmer to bail out on a project. New folks who try outsourcing often give up after their first or second failed attempt. There's no secret - even after years of doing this, I pick the wrong guy every now and then.
Few days ago I made a full-time offer to a php programmer in India after extensive interviewing. Finally, I sent the contract. He went missing since getting the contract. Not a huge surprise - he probably used it to get a better offer at another company. I just went down the list to the next candidates.
In twitter they queue up several content messages a day and schedule them for release using hootsuite on our clients twitter sites. The staff also singles out friend and follower tweets and re-tweets them. And they respond to all @mentions on the sites we run for clients customer service accounts.
For our blog review sites they are the source of the reviews we create. For our product news sites they do product write ups. For our e-book sites they write the e-books. For clients who need whitepapers, they write them.
We do not post on any sites other than our own or on client SMO accounts. We never post anonymously, we never post on a site that is not registered to a paying client.
We do not spam. Spam is for folks who can't originate good content. Over half our content gets re-tweeted, or link backs, so we are doing this the right way.
There is a lot more but the basic principle is that if we are being paid by a client to post on their properties, its legitimate. If they don't own the property, we don't work with them.
If it's coming across as spam, I don't think they are doing it right:)
I have friends that make a killing from SEO and they have blogs on Tumblr and cough Posterous that they tactically use for SEO. They also spend hours writing the content.
This is not the kind of stuff you spend one second banning since none of it is posted to your sites. It is strictly created by and for and posted on the sites owned by the clients.
When you step out of the box and think, you can find plenty of legitimate ways to leverage low cost content providers, for profit.
I agree, there is a right way and a wrong way to do SMO. I think you'll agree that most people offering their SMO services are either selling snake oil or spam. Few seem to know how to do it right. You seem to be in the minority so I'd love to learn more, especially in the context of what the folks overseas do.
Are we talking about them writing quality copy for your website that hit on specific keywords? That would be SEO territory but I know people using Mechanical Turk and other services to get decent-quality copy written for cheap.
I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google.
Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month.
And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from.
And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud.
I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues.
If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines.
As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk.
I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
Wow, that's very insightful! Just knowing we've people here actually succeeding with twitter.
Do you have bunch of niche twitter accounts with a lot of followers that you built up which directs people to your content sites that bring in the dough? I'm trying to understand the general twitter flow.
People's personal experiences are interesting, but are potentially ridiculous generalizations.. like saying Jews make better bankers, the British are good tailors, the French are great chefs, or what not. I doubt all Indian designers are useless..
"After a while, however, the feeling disappears. Seeing your daily revenue go from $1000 to $2000 starts to mean nothing. It's all just business. That's no longer where the excitement is."
Not true at all. It never gets old watching the average daily profit rise.
I find I have to make myself care about those numbers. I tend to fall into a comfort zone, where my brain has decided, "Yes, we have enough money coming in to keep us in food and houses, so we're OK. Think about more important things, now." I've made myself stop dealing directly with our technology lately, and begun to focus more on the money side of things. I've only recently started doing regular bookkeeping and monthly revenue reports and such. And, it is satisfying to watch the numbers increase, but it's not as satisfying as building something new, to me.
After the first $1000 / month I started caring a lot less, because I could eat and pay rent. After $2000 I stopped caring some more, because that is enough for budget travel, which is the biggest "thing" I want. Now I've found my next motivation to be "for each extra $2000 I make, I can have these things some month in the future when I've lost my revenue source".
>I stay 2-3 years behind the trend. After the early adopters have left, there is this gap that can be filled by people who are willing to learn from the failures of the early adopters
That sounds great in theory, but can anyone expand on that? What are some specific examples?
Do pardon me if I'm being obvious or not addressing your question, but the following examples spring to mind:
pets.com, etoys, et al. -> zappos,
altavista, goto, yhoo, et al. -> goog,
broadcast.com, real media, "quicktime TV" -> youtube
These examples were all established a few years after the original players came in fully loaded with cash, hype, etc yet failed to solve or even identify underlying problems.
There are many examples, the whole Japan growth in the eighties was based on this model. They took existing technologies and refined them. Stackoverflow is one example of redefining forums (they essentially killed a lot of programming forums). thesixtyone.com redefined indie music!
You see, there are lots of enterprenuers out there
His description of entrepreneurs is, I think, not very good.
Im sure there are lots of people like he describes who would call themselves entrepreneurs.
But every good one that I've met or "seen" doesn't even half fit such a stereotype. In fact I suspect most really good entrepreneurs are hacks just the same :)
Very nice. Someone who outsources all his work to poorer parts of the world boasting about judging people by the country they come from. Sounds just a little bit like picking your new "employees" at a slave market.
I understand your greater point but I think its misdirected in this case and not entirely fair to Max. What Max is doing in his post... how is that any different from making generalized statements about companies and the quality of products they churn out?
Though I agree that because we are dealing with actual people perhaps more tact should be used. That said, we do live in a global economy. Chances are that the clothes you're wearing now were made by some "slave" in a poor developing country.
It's not slavery if you pay an amount that is fair for the foreign employee. In the Philippines, $275.00 USD is equivalent to a 2k job here in the states.
That's not slavery. As far as classifying quality of work effort by country, try it yourself and in a short time you will learn that different cultures deliver different types of workers, and thinking, and creativity. I know that sounds strange, but it is true.
And here is the funny part of the entire deal. If you suddenly found yourself transported to Russia, Romania, India, the Philippines, or China, good luck getting work as Americans are mostly viewed as fat, lazy, complaining do nothings, who barely understand the concept of a hard days work for a fair wage.
Ask every foreign employee that works for me and not one of them would agree with your comment. They are grateful to have the work, to work at home, to raise their families well, and to do so by using their brains.
I don't feel the least bit bad for outsourcing either. Americans are the hardest employees to manage, and rarely deserve their high cost. There is a huge downside to working with the ME generation. Most think that a job is an entitlement. Ugh...
OK, outsourcing does not equal slavery. That said, we all do stereotype all the time. For example, you probably thought from reading my comment that I'm a fat, lazy American teenager with a sense of entitlement :)
I lived in Russia in the 90s, and I saw exactly the opposite effect from the one you describe first-hand. There were people coming from English-speaking countries who could get management-level jobs mostly by virtue of coming from an English-speaking country. I knew some personally, and I don't hold it against them at all. They were seen as having an understanding of how the capitalist world works, and this was valued (whether or not this was true).
After a decade, the people were not seeing the quick returns from the switch to capitalism that they were hoping for. As a result, the general attitude towards the West in Russia has changed. You can read all about it in the news.
I also have friends back in Russia, who work for an outsourcing company. The majority of programming jobs there that pay a livable salary are outsource. There are few Russian companies that work on original products of their own (Parallels comes to mind).
I hold no illusions. As long as the US market remains the largest, that's where the money will be, and outsourcing will remain a viable strategy. Does the idealist in me wish that the people working outsourced positions could access this market directly, without effectively paying a middleman? Or better yet, have a thriving local market? Yes, but I realize this just won't happen.
The only webservice I pay for is DabbleDB. Dropbox I can live with the restriction, but you absolutely need a database when you need to track a large amount of items.
I'm REALLY suprised that there are not cheaper alternatives to DabbleDB - if there had been anything a bit cheaper or a bit more ajaxified, I'd have gone for it.
Also, the main reason I don't pay for dropbox is that you need to pay for EACH user! So at just 5 users I'm paying $50 a month. That's crazy wasted money!
eh incentives. we all do this to some degree on a daily basis. e.g. downloading your favorite song for free instead of paying .99 for it on itunes, etc.
I have a few friends making a killing doing this. It isn't as easy as it sounds. And it isn't as scammy as it sounds. When done right, it can make good money.
Certainly being a web entrepreneur is considered "not following the herd", but within the "not following the herd" there is also two paths, and one is indeed another herd. I love his philosophy, do not follow the herd. Do your own thing.
what is the point in separating the two, can't you be both?
i would be willing to bet that the majority of people here that consider themselves "entrepreneurs" or are working in startups would identify with almost every single one of those points.
are we all hacks? or is there one point on there that makes you a NON-entrepreneur compared to everyone else who thinks they are?
I'd put it this way: Some people are born to be independent businessmen. They read the theory, they talk the talk, then they take the step and start off in business.
There is the other way - just making money on the internet, and there is no grand plan behind it. It's more of a thing that just develops itself without some type of enterpreneurial drive or theory behind it.
so obviously, he is very entrepreneur-ing, but he is choosing to differentiate himself from people who call themselves entrepreneurs. The reason he wants to do this are what he is writing about.
basically, he gets things done and makes money, even though he is using old tech. he isn't buzz worthly, but he is successful in his own way.
for what it is worth, i really like working with people with this attitude. (except the next step is often looking for bigger markets)
In that post, I was just talking of one particular income source, which is the main one I am doing now. I'll write another post in a few days breaking down exactly where I make the money from. It's not standard landing page crap - it's actually a bit more unexpected (for standard web ppl) than that.
That's about what one can make doing contract work, assuming you're good and reliable and get a bit of referral and repeat business happening.
But, the point of starting a company is usually to do better than contracting, eventually. You trade current comfort for a steadily rising income that, hopefully, some day far surpasses what you could make doing contract work, or working for a major corporation, and most importantly does not scale based on the number of hours you can work, but instead scales on how effectively you build your organization.
With taxes, health insurance, retirement savings, having a place big enough to work out of, etc. $12k/month is comfortable, but not particularly wealthy. It's a modest goal by most startup founders ("entrepreneurs") standards, I would think. I think most tech startup founders are at least looking for "fuck you" money, which is somewhere in the millions for most people. It'd take ~10 years at $12k/month to reach multiple millions.
So, yes, $12k/month isn't very much for the audience he's speaking to, though it's certainly respectable.
He ended by implying he still has his day job. If I read that correctly, that means $12K above his salary and benefits, and with only part time effort.
Actually he ended by saying that he wouldn't quit his job to start a company. This could mean that he started a company on the side and quit once it got to where it paid enough.
Just to back up your exclamation, an income of $144k per year would easily put him/her in the top 15% of US households.. let alone individuals in the world as a whole.
According to http://www.globalrichlist.com/ - an income of $144k per year on an international basis would put you in the top 0.37% earners in the world.. more people than that alone live in North Korea.
Is it really any surprise that you can make lots of money if you use cheap labour, if you're okay with releasing - and perhaps even selling, though I hope not - garbage software ("Release a really crappy version", "I don't spend money on design"), and if you're content without innovating or trying to break new ground?
The world is full of people who do that, and yes, many of them get by just fine, and some make lots of money. But there's far more to life, and work, than that.
For me, that's what's so great about HN: it is full of inspirations for a web developer like myself. Inspirational companies and inspirational people who don't rest until they get it right. Who push the envelope. Who care deeply about the experience of using their software.
This post contains nothing inspirational like that. I've worked for people like this before. Never again.