I’ve been dealing a lot with India these past few months. In my day job, I’ve hired a team of Indian resources from a major consulting company to build a significant application for us. To build my first online product, I’m using Mind Genies in Noida, India, to build my stroller site for me.
I found them through eLance. What sold me was their design talent. I figured that it would be difficult to evaluate a service provider based upon their coding talents. So I decided to pay a bit of a premium (we’re only talking a few hundred more) to buy design talent. If you look at their portfolio, it’s pretty impressive – especially compared to the other vendors that were bidding on my work.
Thankfully, they didn’t show me their main site. However, I do get a lot of enjoyment knowing that I’ve hired “eMagicians” who upon landing on their home page greet me with “Welcome to our e-Magical World!”
If you haven’t dealt with an Indian provider, here’s what you can expect:
Costs Are Ridiculously Affordable
Compared to North American costs, Indian resources are incredibly affordable – perfect for me who is starting out and doesn’t have a lot of capital for launch. I am not exaggerating when I say that I’m paying less than 3% what I would pay some of the companies that I’ve worked for in the past who do similar things. When I show people the mock ups, they are blown away at the level of design and functionality I’m getting for the fraction of the price.
Talent Is Out There
As I’ve said above, I looked at coding to be a bit of a commodity in the marketplace – compared to design talent. Before I offend my web developer friends, I’ll say that this first build of my site has some room to be messy and inelegant. For the purpose of launch, I’m willing to scrimp on the beauty of the technical architecture to get higher end design skills. Only one of the providers that bid on my project came close to their design work. And I have a feeling that this little firm is likely to be talented on the coding side of things as well.
When You Are Sleeping, They Are Awake
Although this really sucks if your project follows an agile methodology or if you need to operate in a collaborative environment, the time zone difference can benefit you in that you don’t lose a day in reviewing and providing feedback on their work. For me, it means that I can review the work after I tuck the tots in bed and provide comments before the start of their work day. I typically get another package drop by 10:00 am the next day. I’ll do a brief check during my lunch hour, digest my thoughts and then hammer something out that evening. And the cycle goes on.
There’s Still Some Overlap
Noida is nine and a half hours ahead, which means that 7:00am EST is their 4:30pm. Early on, when Mind Genies was compiling their quote, I got on MSN messenger with them to work out some of the details before heading to the office. I figure this little bit of overlap will come in handy if ever communications are stalled in email.
You’ll Need to Employ Non-Traditional Ways To Share and Communicate
“Non-traditional” is all relative these days. We use email for 99.9% of our communications, and I have only needed real-time communication once in the four weeks I’ve been dealing with them. If you don’t have Skype or instant messenger set up yet, you’ll definitely need to do that if you want to use an Indian company. I’ll be moving into development shortly, so these tools may become more required. I’ve also had another provider use YouSendIt to share large files.
You’ll need to Adapt To the Language Differences
I’ll be talking specifically about communicating with an Indian vendor in a future post, but suffice it to say that things get lost in translation. It might just be typical for all vendors (I know it happens even dealing with North American companies), but I’m finding that work will be completed half-done. I’ll indicate whole sections of copy should be copied and pasted into mock ups. However, when they get returned, the implementation won’t meet expectations. Thankfully, Mind Genies always has quickly addressed the fixes.
This experience may not be limited to Indian providers – they might be the same for off shore providers from Russia and China, etc. I wouldn’t know since I’ve only dealt with off-shore resources from India.
Overall, it’s been awesome using off shore resources. It works very well with my working schedule, and I’m getting some great work for the fraction of the price.
So I’ll ask you: Have you had the opportunity to deal with Indian resources? What has your experience been?
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