Found+READ: Comments by Ilya Lichtenstein

Ilya Lichtenstein — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:55:01 GMT

I think this is potentially a very exciting new venture. By allowing anyone to contribute, and fostering intelligent, enlightening discussion, you’re creating a very unique(and valuable!) community.
I look forward to participating.
The salon metaphor couldn’t be more apt.

Ilya Lichtenstein — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:50:29 GMT

As a marketing guy, I would love to see and participate in a story like this, so that we can all learn from each other.

In particular, I would like to see something on community-based marketing- blogs, forums, etc. In a word- how to generate organic discussion about your startup/product.

Ilya Lichtenstein — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:14:15 GMT

Those are great posts, and there are many gems in the comments. Too bad Kathy Sierra isn’t blogging anymore :(

Ilya Lichtenstein — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 03:04:23 GMT

Allright, here’s my post on how to create communities:

http://neomeme.net/2007/04/18/how-to-create-communities/

Let me know what you think.

Ilya Lichtenstein — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:14:03 GMT

The final, much revised product is posted here:
http://www.foundread.com/view/vet-reward

Thanks everyone for your contributions.

Ilya Lichtenstein — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:12:50 GMT

This would make a very good article. I’ve had a lot of work done for me by outsourcers for several (small) projects, and I imagine it’s very tempting for anyone building a startup to hire some ridiculously cheap developers.

The biggest pitfall of oursourcing overseas, in my experience is accountability. Although they will complete the initial project in order to get paid, overseas contractors can be difficult to get in touch with later, and may be unwilling to work on the code further as bugs and issues invariably crop up later. Also, the ease with which anyone can sign up at a freelancer site means that you often have no way of gauging the ability of the programmers- leaving you with potentially buggy or poorly written code, and little to no help once issues crop up later.

That said, if you want to go ahead and give it a try, the best sites for outsourcing hands down are rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com. GetaFreelancer is probably the biggest,and has the most overseas developers who will work for ridiculously low amounts, almost always less than $10 an hour.

In my experience, the best use for freelancers is for small, self-contained tasks like a single piece of code, template, or logo. It will cost you very little(larger projects are snapped up by outsourcing companies who act as middlemen and pass the costs on to you) and will probably go smoothly. If you offload basic and time-consuming tasks to overseas freelancers and have your in-house developers put the whole thing together, you can potentially save A LOT of money. But always insist on frequent communication and accountability for bugs or mistakes.

Ilya Lichtenstein — Sat, 19 May 2007 05:50:06 GMT

Getafreelancer.com and rentacoder.com have worked for me, although you’re more likely to find Indian and Eastern European coders than Americans there.