Looking for a Rails Shop to Build an Alpha Version
July 4th, 2008
Your TeleDoctor is looking for a service provider to build an alpha version of the service.
Here are the options I found so far:
- Elc Techlnologies that have a Service for Entrepreneurs to provide you with a 1.0 version in as little as 6 weeks. The cost is 90K, all inclusive. Their portfolio is impressive.
- Atlantic Dominion Solution offers to develop around 25 mockups and provide me with one month with one developer for around 32K. Of course, this doesn’t ensure that I will have all the funtionalities implemented. I don’t know how much I should add to this, knowing tht a developer’s rate is $11o an hour.
- InfoEther is a superstars rails shop and have people like Chad Fowler and Rick Kilmer as developers. Their rate is $200 to $225 dollars an hour. This is pretty expensive but can offer consultancy if I choose to work with less skilled developers.
- HashRocket has a program similar to Elc Technologies called 3-2-1 Launch, but the duration is 1 month. They provide you with two developers, rough out an application in 3 days and spend the rest of the month cleaning up and adding features the application according to customer feedback.
- Freelancers. I don’t know what to say about freelancers but from my previous experience, it is very hard to manage someone that will get paid on a hourly basis. I think the best option for someone with limited ressources is to fix the goal. The compagnies that I stated have a proved process and can deliver. One of the problems I ran into for my previous startup is running out of money while paying developers $90 an hour. I spent over $15,000 dollars for maybe one or two functionalities that are not even working properly.
So if you are a rails shop and wants to work towards building an alpha version of teledoctor, please send me an email to mehdi.akiki@gmail.com.
July 4th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
i thought the alpha version was built a while ago? shouldn’t you ask yourself questions why $15.000 were spent and you only got one or 2 features “barely working” ?
I guess this boils down to one thing: do you really know where you are heading to?
July 4th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Thanks for the reply Heri.
I knew where I was heading to, but you should read and understand what I am writing. When you contract someone and pay him by the hour, you can run into the problem of spending on spending more that what was expected. This is a comon problem in software anyways. Most projects go over budget because of lack of good planning and having optimistic previsions on what can be completed.
I want to work with a team and that we setup a budget from the beginning and decide of the features that can be built from day one. This way the developers will make the EFFORT to deliver rather than ask for money for whatever hours they supposedly worked.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Here’s my advice : a good plan makes a good path towards a good product. The key combo at Praized for that is a Product Manager (Seb) with a clear vision of the product and the market and someone with lots of experience on making a project happen (me). Then the “construction” can be accomplished either completely in house or partially outsourced, but if your product is your company I would strongly advise against going with outside consultants for more than 30-40% of your workload, it’s in my experience a sure way towards disaster, either in the building phase or in production if you are lucky enough to get there…
And as you are writing, pessemistic planning is a much saner way to work schedules and budget, planning for worse case makes for great news if you end up being too pessimistic, while the opposite is bad.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
BTW, I don’t believe you can make a good prototype (not even the final product) for any significant business with less than 50-100k. In rare occurences maybe, but these are exceptions rather than the norm.
July 17th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Thanks for the advices Sylvain.
I would love to hear more from you about your experience on making a product happen.
What happens often is you often overestimate the time needed to get there as well as the problems that may ( and will?) occur before getting to your goal.
What about getting always reviewing the goal?
July 18th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Hum, that could be a great topic for my next barcamp presentation : “getting technology done, how to estimate, manage and ship!”…