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Ask HN: Anyone used oDesk to build their MVP?

5 points by dcpdx ↗ HN
I'm a non-technical "founder" considering using oDesk to hire a Rails dev to finish work on my MVP so I can get something out there and testing for relatively cheap. Has anybody gone this route before and if so, how was the experience? Do you have anybody you can recommend?

And for the technical people, can you offer advice on any pitfalls to be aware of when using this option?

Thanks for the help.

5 comments

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tilt
I'd start from here, HN, (or usethesource.com) first...
dcpdx
Any advice on how to word it? I've tried the "seeking technical cofounder" thing which didn't go anywhere but I have cash and am looking to build out a core feature set. Some of the work is already done so they would be taking the reigns with the code.
jrsmith1279
I've worked as a developer through oDesk and I also hired developer to do a little bit of work for me through oDesk. When working as a developer on oDesk there was more than one occasion where I was hired to either finish something that another oDesk contractor didn't finish, or fix something that wasn't written quite right. The code that I had to work with from the previous developers was always pretty sloppy and never commented and it looked thrown together.

When I hired a developer I got good results. The developer came in way under the amount of time that he quoted, and the code was very clean & commented.

I believe that the difference was that I hired someone based on their skills and the interview where the people who I did work for had initially hired based on lowest price and they got what they paid for. You'll find that the lower priced devs are usually a group of people or a company who is pumping out code as quickly and are more worried about quantity than quality.

dcpdx
I'm not about hiring at the lowest hourly rate; I'd rather pay more for quality, usable code that can be iterated on than pay less for garbage.

Do you have anybody you'd feel comfortable recommending? I'm looking for proficiency in Rails, Javascript, jQuery, AJAX, and at least the basics of HTML/CSS. I'm not completely clueless about the development process either as I've been working alongside my current freelance dev to write the front-end as he codes the backend (we use git for VCS). I can speak the language (at least at a basic level) and can provide a full spec and HTML mocks if needed.

If you have anybody in mind, feel free to email me at claydani [at] gmail [dot] com

jrsmith1279
Unfortunately I've only ever hired PHP devs and it looks like they focus mainly on PHP.