akshay

See if these might help - http://howtolaunchastartup.com/2011/06/20/21-must-read-resou...

sure ping me at akshay at getcomparisons dot com. Glad you like the new name better.

Glad you found the resources useful!

Cool. Thx for the feedback... will play around with the color scheme

Yup he's already on the list. Unfortunately couldn't add all the awesome resources I've curated..

I'm currently off-shoring the development of my startup to India and it’s been working out great, but it took a lot of trial and error - kissed a lot of proverbial frogs so to speak.

Here’s my experience and if this helps someone gain a better handle on how to deal with the issue, great! The first time I looked to off-shore my development, I went with traditional off-shore development providers and was severely disappointed. The developers I found had big firm coding experience – having worked on projects for Goog, Msft etc and probably could build software on a consulting basis but just didn't get "startup" development. They needed a defined set of requirements within which they could work and needed for those requirements not to change. You can forget about pivoting. This "big-company, back-office" mentality obviously won't work for startups. They don't understand agile software development and are terrible with communication. And by communication I don't mean English, that’s usually not the issue; the issue is their approach to communication with a team - closing the loop on emails, replying in a timely manner (or doing anything in a timely manner for that matter) and addressing all the issues you communicate with them.

After spending time with 2-3 different teams I changed my approach and started searching for people who were passionate about and contributed to open-source, were active on forums, on Twitter & Fb, and were excited about working on my idea – as opposed to guys wanting to make money from a consulting gig. I found my current developer through such a search and so far it’s been great. There have been some hiccups, but I daresay these aren't issues that would have cropped up even with a team located stateside.

So I’m running a distributed company and it’s working out to be very cost-effective - which was the reason I started down this path in the first place. Anyways this is my experience. I may be one of the lucky few; but I do believe that you can find folks with a mentality suited to startups. And if you do, the cost savings are worth the pain.

I did quit my day job and decide to pursue my long-time goal of building a startup vs. getting a grad degree. Great article.