Ask YC: Cloud-Outsourcing, Cloud-Offshoring - what do you think?

[iamyoohoo]

We all need help from time to time. We may not have the resources to do everything all the time and a little help goes a long way, whether it be to program something or test something - small project or large.

Not just for startups, but for small businesses or even for mid size businesses that are short on IT resources but do not want to hire full time or even hire a contractor for a month.

The problem with sites like ELance, Rentacoder and even ODesk etc. is that you have to add a bid, wait for people to respond, take a guess at which one would be able to do a good job, and hope that the work will happen. Most people that have used it will say they have had bad experiences at some time or another - quite often many times.

So here's the concept that I am hoping to implement. Let's call it "cloud-outsourcing" or "cloud-offshoring". A similar concept to cloud-computing (amazon ec2, s3 etc.), the concept is to outsource to a cloud - whether the job is small or large (2 hours, 2 days or 20 months), you can outsource/offshore the work to the cloud and only pay for the work done finally. You don't pay if nothing's used, and you only pay when it's done.

-- will you use it for that 10 hour thing you want done -- will you use it for that 10 day thing you want done -- cloud-computing is based on processing/bandwidth/storage etc. which are consistent parameters, how would you price this service ?

The reason I'm bringing this up is that I specialize in outsourced/offshore development, have a fully offshore team which is very reliable but I always feel people have a hard time finding other developers to go to when they need it and they may not always need a contractor for 6 months and may not need a person all day, they may need someone 2 hours a day for a month and there is no reliable and easy way of getting that kind of help.

Thoughts ? How would you want to use such a service if you had the need ? What tools would this need, what would make you comfortable trusting something like this (if it was not amazon that created ec2, i'm sure the startup would have a hard time getting adoption, hence the question)

Thank you.

[xirium]

You could try timeslicing. A large number of accountants work part time. For example, Monday to Wednesday for one company the freelance work from Thursday to Saturday. This arrangement works well for all concerned. The company gets an expert who learns the business at a pro-rata rate. The accountant get steady work and also lucrative work or take long weekends.

For computing, a large number of organisations would benefit from having a the same DBA for one day per week or the same graphic artist for four hours per week.

[iamyoohoo → xirium]

Timeslicing, cloud-outsourcing. I really like the terms that are coming up here. Thanks. good feedback.

[gscott]

Most people do not want to spec out every detail, so I feel there would be a market for you there.

I would call it "Low Spec Web Application Design". Customer submits the idea that is something like this "I want a web application like twitter and youtube combined." They submit $500, you create a spec and mock up. They accept and they pay you some sort of up-front fee. Then deviations from the spec are factored in at $x per hour.

I know someone who has an "Indian programming team" and he has to tell them in great detail what to do. They have to have every step a-b-c they cannot make a leap from a-c figuring out b on there own. Great detail has to spent on instructions for anything no matter how small.

This makes everything like torture and in order to be able to use them he has about 10 projects going at once so even when they can't work on one project there is something else to do.

The projects also re-utilize many of the same details from the last project. Even so, all of those same details have to be given even though they have done more then 10 projects with the same instructions for example, the flash uses inputs from the query string, every time, each project uses the same inputs. They have to be told each time to not hardcode links into the flash, they have to be told again what querystring items to take and how to use them, this is one example. This programmers are dedicated, they are not supposed to be working on projects for any other company, so they should be able to figure out "hey this is just like that last one" but they can't

The point is, if you can create a service which can do the logical leaps from a-c like an in-house programmer can do then you would have a good service.

As for a market, there have been many people on news.yc (non-hackers) that ask about having an offshore development team do the work on there "amazing" idea. I believe this desire is widespread but the problem is how to get something you don't have 100 pages of nitty gritty detail documentation on developed. I would suggest specializing in "alpha" implementations of ideas for non-hackers that want to test there ideas and have some money to burn.

[iamyoohoo → gscott]

Thanks, Good feedback. I really like the concept of specializing in alpha implementations and personally I'd find that interesting as well.