Freelance coding is better....Why limit urself to Jamaica.
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@kknight, you can't built a great product with a team of coders that are;
(1) Geographically dispersed
(2) Don’t share the same risk and reward of the founders
(3) Don’t understand the culture, and socio-economic background of the country of operations.
To develop a great a product, you need to have a team that can respond instantly to changes in current market conditions. As a result, entrepreneurs will have to be very agile in adjusting their business strategy to keep pace with consumers trends. Hence, outsourcing your coding work, especially to foreign markets like India, will not allow you to respond as quickly as you would need to, in order to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities.
Occasionally, tech start-ups may have to pivot, in order to take advantage of business opportunities that significantly differ from the original business concept. Paypal for example started off as a payment encryption service, but the founders realized that users were using the service to make personal payments. Consequently, just by observing how users interacted with the app, Paypal adjusted its business strategy from an internet security company to an online personal payment processing service.
The freelance process has some inherent limitations that make it impossible for a tech start-up to be as nibble as possible, like;
1) You’re confined to only bidders that bid on your project, and not the entire community of developers.
2) Assessing coders is difficult as the rating and review system does not adequately measure skills and aptitude.
3) If you’re lucky enough to find a good coder, there is no guarantee that this person will be available for work in the future, hence, you would have to start the process all over again.
This is mostly based on my personal experience of finding coders from Rent-a-coder, Elance, and Freelancer to work on various projects. So the best thing to do if you are a Tech Entrepreneur is to build your team with people whom for the most part can actually attend face-to face meetings (BTW, this process cannot be fully replaced by Skype).
@kknight, Rafer wants to design, launch and continually modify the application until it reaches a point of stability/profitability. If it is a simple application then freelancers may work but anything too complicated will burn through a lot of freelancers. It all depends on how complicated it is and the expected development time.
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Me, I'm a good coder but I have stayed away from programming as a career because the compensation/rewards locally are unattractive.
I also have a ton of good ideas but again...
One idea I had years ago was an iphone app that provides near realtime updates of gas prices for every gas station on the island.
And it would have some other cool features based on your location anywhere on the island.
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