I don't think you can blame outsourcing for that exclusively. Most startups rewrite their code multiple times, to track design changes. OTOH, if it was a rewrite motivated by code quality issues, I can see what you mean.

;-)

(The beers make us care even more.)

Hope someday we get that chance.

where do you live?

I and a couple of friends of mine did the technical work for a startup on a contract basis 2-3 years ago. We were working in our spare time, and it seemed like a fun project, and a good occasion to learn Rails.

Of course, little did we realize that they were planning to pay us with money they hadn't actually raised yet.

We did end up completing the working demo for them, but basically left after that because they weren't paying us. They had the demo they needed to keep pitching it to investors, but it took a lot longer than they had expected. A year or so later, they had apparently raised more capital, because they launched a beta from a different technical team that had apparently rewritten the site from scratch in PHP. They have since unlaunched, though the site still offers to let you know when they launch.

If you can perform technical work yourself, you have the ability to keep working on delivering the product you want to deliver without draining your cash reserves. You can take a day job, live in your parents basement, or whatever works for you that allows you to keep building your company.

If you can't perform technical work yourself, then the minute you run out of money, you lose the ability to work on your product. That gives your project a much higher risk of failure.

We outsourced initial development of a prototype, it cost us little money but much time, and the quality of the output was appalling (from both a user and a technical perspective). It was functional on a very pedantic level, but mostly useless.

Daniel