Questions

I designed an enterprise level application for the network marketing industry. We have an MVP that is gathering fantastic data, and scheduled multiple meeting with potential Angels/advisors. While I am extremely passionate about the company, the ultimate goal will be a buyout. From a acquisition value perspective, would it be better to: 1) hire and manage an internal development team; or 2) outsource to an experienced development team. What are the pros and cons of each? Much appreciated. Thank you all for your wisdom :)

I disagree with Grant and Niels. Hiring local doesn't guarantee a positive outcome. And depending on where you live, you may not be able to find someone local! Both a local, "in-house" team and a remote team can work equally well (or equally badly). When my co-founder and I were developing the MVP for Closeup.fm, we worked with a developer in Poland, a developer in Memphis, developers outside of Vancouver, and developers in Knoxville, Tennessee, where we live. None of them was perfect. Where your developers live is less important than your attitude toward development. If software development is your core business right now (as it is ours), then it's too important to delegate. That means that even if you aren't writing code, you need to be involved in the development process: thinking through uses cases and developing requirements documents and creating wireframes. Your coders/programmers can't read your mind, and they usually won't make the intuitive choices that you think are obvious. You can hire the best developers in the world and still produce a crappy product if your development process/methodology is broken. It's easy to blame your broken process on outsourcing. Once we transitioned to using agile methodology (and associated tools) to drive our development, speed improved dramatically. Get the right tools and process in place, and you can source talent anywhere. If you'd like to discuss in more depth, give me a call. Hope this helps, Austin


Answered 9 years ago

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