Outsourcing HellIn the past year I’ve expanded our “Gizmos for” brand by launching Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. By May 1st we will officially launch Gizmos for Cooks. Lining up editors and writers for the sites and technically setting up the sites is really quite easy and does not take up too much time, but creating the theme or the layout of the site is a different story. Sure I can make a theme that works but without the eye of a designer I can churn out a theme that could instantly turn away readers.

I decided to take the design and creation of themes for these sites as an exercise in outsourcing.

Basically, there are a few ways to find outsourcing staff. First, you could run a google search and pick a couple outsourcing companies and “interview” them. The next approach is to rely on feedback from friends and partners that required your same services. Finally, you can go with a site like Rent A Coder, Elance or Guru that help match professionals looking for work and employers.

The first assignment was to create the themes for Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. I elected to use the second approach which was to use feedback from friends and partners that required the same services. As it turned out, Real Tech News had just redesigned and had their new theme developed for them so I used their developer.

Here’s where I learned my first and second lesson. I provided the developer a couple of sites that I would like the GfB and GfK to emulate as well as a basic color scheme. I then let the developer go off and do the work as I’m not and never had been a micro-manager in the “real world”. A week went by with no update so I pinged the developer. I usually had to ping the developer two times before I could elicit a response. This went on for weeks with excuse after excuse after he had promised the stars in one to two weeks. After the fifth week we parted ways. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the themes which are adaptations of other themes available on the Internet.

I mentioned there were two lessons learned… well, the first lesson is to be as specific as possible when outsourcing. The second lesson is to maintain communication on a daily basis through email and through regular reports from the outsourced staff. I believe this second lesson can be relaxed once you’ve gotten to know your outsourced staff, but I haven’t been able to achieve that yet!

The second attempt at outsourcing was recently with the Gizmos for Cooks site. This time I opted to use the third option for outsourcing. Since I was experimenting I took notes and tried each of the three services: Rent A Coder, Elance and Guru. I posted the exact same description which detailed plugins to be used, version of the blogging software, where columns need to be, what the logo should look like, where the ads (with sizes) would be places, etc…. You get the idea. I spent over an hour crafting the description to use on the sites.

Next I created a new project or bid. During this process I discovered that Guru had really strict rules on how to post a project and that I could not request mockups. Also, the project budget is restricted to ranges ($250-$500 for instance). Since I wanted to spend $200-$300 for a theme this was disappointing. Elance had a similar restriction and I could only set a budget of $500 or less. Finally, Rent a Coder had several bonuses the other sites did not have including forcing a bidder to put up an Expert Guarantee that would be lost if they could not finish the work. Also, you could set the exact days you wanted the bidding to remain open as well as setting the budget to any dollar amount.

After another hour plus I had finally submitted the project for bid. I received the following bids:

Guru:
3 bids
$470 from New Zealand
$500 from NY, USA
$480 from CA, USA

Elance:
3 bids
$900 from Romania
$250 from US
$400 from NM, US

Rentacoder:
3 bids
No bid - Azerbaijan
No bid - India
$300 - Peru

I decided to go with the $300 bid on Rent a Coder from Peru. While the US bid at $250 was tempting, my cat could design better themes than what was in his portfolio. The developer from Peru had nice but mostly unoriginal themes, but with my description I figured the theme would turn out nicely. Before accepting his bid I contacted the developer to verify that he understood the project and that he could complete it on time. The bidding process took another couple of hours bringing my outsourcing experiment up to five hours of work… that’s about how long it takes me to create a theme!

Unfortunately I learned another lesson from the Peruvian… don’t believe any excuses and do not give an outsourced employee a second chance if he/she has not proven themselves yet. Basically his promise of providing the theme within four days (which was less than I had asked for) did not come true. He refused to answer his communication and missed new deadline after new deadline. Having to follow the rules of Rent a Coder or forfeit my escrowed money, I had to keep him longer than I normally would. After a brief mediation that I easily won I reclaimed my money after working on outsourcing one theme for 10 hours. Frustrated with the amount of time I wasted, I ended up designing and developing the theme which is an adaptation of another theme available on the Internet (sound familiar?).

Perhaps my next experiment will be an outsourced company that I discover through a Google search but for now, outsourcing has been a waste of my time! Build it and automate it seems to be the way to go, but automating the creation of theme building is an impossible task.

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