David Chiu

Via oDesk:

Stature Software launched in summer 2006 as a two-man outfit with a vision that was bigger than they could hope to possibly accomplish alone. With no initial capital investment, it now has annual revenue of $2 million. The company’s success has been built with remote providers. “I realized at the time that the future was with offshore developers,” says partner Gregory Silvano. Relying almost entirely on remote providers, they’re experts at managing global online workteams — they have 20 oDesk providers and a smaller number of outside contractors — so we asked them for a buyer’s perspective on provider relationships. [...]

I think this is a great inspirational story of what is possible in this new economy. I recently started to work with remote provider companies such as oDesk because of converging deadlines I had on multiple projects. As an independent developer I needed to quickly scale my operations to meet the demands of my clients and still be able to make a profit. oDesk provided the best and easiest solution. Here are some of the features that won me over:

• Jobs can be defined as hourly or fixed price.
• Weekly hourly limits can be defined and easily modified
• Good amount of detail on a perspective hire including skills, english level, hours worked on oDesk, etc
• Time monitoring and work diary
• oDesk issues an NDA to providers that is then transferred to you

One of the biggest advantages to oDesk is the time monitoring application. This also happens to be one of the biggest contentions providers have with oDesk. This application not only tracks the providers time, but periodically takes screenshots of their desktop and uploads it to oDesk for viewing by the employer. I could see how this may seem invasive from a developers point of view, but it’s a good way to keep people honest in their time reporting.

The trick to using oDesk, freelancers, or even hiring full time employees for that matter, is finding the right people. Your decision shouldn’t be completely based on the cheapest bidder. Cheap does not equal quality. Plus, if it takes a “cheap” developer triple the time to accomplish a task that a more expensive developer could complete in a third of the time with better quality, then you’ve made a bad business decision.

I’m still learning how to work with remote providers on oDesk and establish the most effective workflow. So far the experience has been good and I’ve been able to find a few people who have been able to deliver quality work to help me with my endeavors. I aspire to match and even exceed the success that Structure Software has had using remote providers.