When striving to grow a company, sometimes it's the small wins that count the most. Although these accomplishments may not be considered newsworthy by the masses, they contribute to your company’s progress, and offer tactical lessons that others can apply in their own entrepreneurial journey.
In this special installment of #Smallwins, Matthew Hender, a Graduate of the Perth Founder Institute, discusses the struggles he endured to achieve a small win for his company, Cycle My City, and the lessons he learned as a result.
"Some small wins happen quickly, some take a bit longer. At Cycle My City we just launched our cycle tracking app for Android. Our’s took a bit longer...
Outsourcing is a double edged sword. While it is a useful tool for a bootstrapper like Cycle My City or a well funded start-up looking to push their productivity, it needs to be understood and closely managed. Our 10 week app development ended up taking over a year to complete.
Is that a bad result? Yes it is, but it had a silver lining. We took the time to further develop our website, improve the UI to a standard that didn’t make us cringe, and tested our site extensively using Garmin cycle computers.
As a founder and an advisor, I’ve spoken to a lot of startups about outsourcing and I have a rule that I always share: “Test them quickly and fire them without hesitation”. Basically, ensure that the milestones are set up to test their coding, design, or whatever combination of skills they are contributing, very quickly and cheaply, and if they don’t meet your expectations, cancel the job. By expectations, I mean of quality, there is nothing wrong with going back and forth a couple of times to refine a design, but make sure the milestone payment is only released when they get it right.
So, did my rule fail me? Not quite. I rely on my rule to identify quality developers and designers, but it isn’t really suited to schedule performance unless they are very late at the start. In our case the developer did a great job - up until he’d burnt through his funds (we hadn’t released them all, but he knew a loss was coming and so started other jobs to maintain cash-flow).
One of the traps of outsourcing is the lure of cheap results. In our experience the contractors have always finished their work, but I’m sure that others could tell of less happy endings. In fact, being aware of the fact that jobs are so often underbid I’m actually an advocate of the 80/20 rule with outsourcing. In the past we’ve let contractors get 80% done before taking it over, both to speed up completion but also to adjust those nuances that are too time consuming to communicate.
In this case we couldn’t do that, as no one was an Android developer, so, notwithstanding the fact that we provided a 70 page scope document, full wireframes and all images, the risk was ours (contrary to popular belief, the risks you ‘transfer’ under a contract always fall back to you) and we were late. We’re happy with the product, a testament to the quality of the developer, but what could we have done differently?
At the outset we knew the developer’s quoted completion time was optimistic. I’ve never had an outsourced job finish on time, but we allow for that in our assessment. We tried a few things, including offering completion bonuses (they were never met because the developer still under-estimated the work to complete), we offered to help (and in the end did solve one or two of their API problems for them), and sought status updates to assess progress ourselves (but they couldn’t bring themselves to be realistic about that either).
Looking back, the answer is obvious - you can’t possibly expect an app that you had quoted locally for over $100k to be outsourced for $3,500. Well, you shouldn’t be disappointed if it doesn’t quite go to plan.
If we had our time again I wouldn’t discount outsourcing, but I’d definitely put more effort into identifying a local partner or co-founder, given how critical this work was to making our product available to a wide market."
If you’re an entrepreneur making waves within your business or industry, tweet @founding your company's accomplishments with #Smallwins or share below!
For more exclusive Founder Insights, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.