We’re thrilled to be launching the new Flatsourcing Dashboard at the TC50 DemoPit.  We’ll be in the DemoPit tomorrow, and are will be doing it up New Orleans-style with Mardi Gras beads and bottles of Tabasco.
It’s been a lot of work getting the new Flatsourcing Dashboard ready for launch.  Oleg, Alex and Timur have been working really hard to get everything prepped.  We’ll be releasing it to all clients next week.

Hurricane Gustav threw us a curveball this week and unfortunately Will Donaldson isn’t able to come along, but my good friend Gerard Ramos has stepped up and will be helping me out.  I’m excited to spend time with the former local New Orleans developer who’s stepped up to the big leagues now in San Francisco.

Everyone has worked really hard to get the Flatsourcing Dashboard ready, and it is something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now.  We felt a need for a central location for our clients to collaborate with us.  But, we didn’t want to lock clients into a proprietary project management tool, we pride ourselves on working within existing project management protocol.

The Flatsourcing Dashboard (login:voodoo password:123456) accomplishes some of the things we feel are important when collaborating globally:

• Get to know your team with avatars
• Keep up on your project with a “news feed” of all communications in Basecamp or any other project management tools.
• Keep track of your contract and invoices all in once place.
• Get in touch with us in an emergency instantly and easily.
• Learn the best way to work with us with FAQ’s and a client manual.

All of this is in the Flatsourcing Dashboard, providing “outsourcing insight” to our clients and taking our services to a whole new level.

I’m so excited to be out here at TC50.  If you’re in town and want to meet up, email me at cschultz@flatsourcing.com.  Follow me on Twitter for updates.

I love attending the SXSW Interactive conference every year.  It’s my favorite conference of the year, a chance to learn, catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and of course have a great time.

Last year I pledged to myself that I would try to get further involved and organize a panel for this 2009.  So I put together a panel submission covering a topic that I have a little expertise on and I think people are interested in hearing about.

Let me start by saying, my goal for this post is that you will click on over to the SXSW Panel Picker and vote for our panel and even leave a comment about how much you want to see it. OK, so now that that is out there, let me tell you why you should do that.

Our panel is called: Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not?

The topic of the panel stems from a discussion I had last year with Sandeep Sood of Monsoon Company, a fellow oursourcing firm, about the challenges of outsourcing web development work, whether the pain of working with a team thousands of miles away is worth it, and how to develop personal relationships that bridge cultural and geographical borders.

I am fortunate to have rounded up some great co-panelists for this discussion all of whom bring a different perspective to outsourcing and each of whom run a successful development firm:

• Sandeep Sood – Sandeep runs Monsoon Company in Berkley with teams in India. He authors the Doubsourcing comic (recently featured in WSJ) and sends his apologies to Thomas Friedman that he believes the world is not yet flat in Forbes.
• Qasim Mueen – Qasim is in Pittsburgh with teams in Pakistan. He is the co-founder and CEO of Zigron.
• Andrea Azdril – Andrea is Los Angeles with development in Beijing, China. She is the CEO of StarTech Global and frequently travels back and forth from China.

Some personal thoughts on this panel that I’d like to share:

Submitting a panel topic about outsourcing web development work to a conference full of web developers feels a little like trying to sell ice cubes to eskimos.  It definitely is a topic that may be somewhat taboo, certainly considering these economic times and what you hear in the media about jobs going overseas.

Along the same lines, I sometimes feel challenged talking about our business structure, and our Flatsourcing team with colleagues in New Orleans.  I am friends with talented web developers locally who are looking for work, is it parodoxical to be passionate about supporting the local community while taking my work and having it done in Russia?

I think reconciling these feelings is a lot of why I believe this panel topic to be so important.  There are real tensions and preconceptions about outsourcing, and the controversial nature of the topic is exactly why I believe we need to discuss it.

I fully expect to have the question thrown at me “Why are you hiring guys 3000 miles away instead of guys in this room?” And that will be a tough question to answer.

When I think about that question, it boils down my personal feeling that the world really is getting smaller.  Imagine a world that truly was flat, so a business partner or employee on the other side of the world was as easy to work with as your neighbor across the street.  Collaboration tools, broadband, and common language of software means you can work with whomever you choose.

In 2001, I met three guys over eLance because I needed someone to build a website for me, and I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t know anyone personally who could.  They did a great job, we continued to build our partnership, and a few trips to Russia and eight years later we’re in business together.  And asking me why I’m working with them over someone local simply boils down to the fact that this is the direction I have chosen, it is working, and the value of our relationships is not something that I measure in terms of how far away they are.

This may be the case for you, Chris, but what about if I am evaluating outsourcing now, with no personal history.  I’m working with a clean slate?

Well, this is the discussion I have almost every day with clients.  Outsourcing exists because there is global demand for talent and there is a global marketplace.  Release the bonds of locale, and your hiring pool is global.  Wouldn’t you want to explore the opportunity to hire top talent, anywhere in the world?

That is the reality of what you can do today.

It’s not about low cost, its about value.  And value is driven more by quality than cost.  Web development in particular is a marketplace that is fully globalized. It opens up a world of opportunity to build new “virtual” companies that transcend borders.

So, that is a sneak peak at some of the thoughts I am looking forward to sharing on the panel.  I’d love you hear some of yours in the comments.  Ask me the tough questions, I hope to be able to answer them.

I genuinely hope that we have the opportunity to discuss this at SXSW.  You can help by voting for us here.

Thanks.

I just got back from visiting my partners in Flatsourcing in Kazan, Russia. This was my third trip to Kazan, and by far the most exciting. This stems from both the growth we are experiencing with Flatsourcing, but even more importantly the changes that are taking place right before my eyes in the city.

On arrival in Kazan, one of the first things you notice is that the whole city is under construction. Since last year a major road repair program has taken place and pot-hole lines streets have been replaced with paved, widened highways. Soviet-era block houses are being replaced by new apartment buildings. I was fortunate enough to stay in a new apartment that Oleg’s family has purchased. In the last three years mortgages have become commonplace in Russia, and cars and apartments are fast becoming part of the middle-class lifestyle. Speaking of cars, as we drove to work each morning, we passed dealerships for Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai as well as Mercedes and BMW. Word is that the Chinese auto manufacturers will be invading next year. They already have their fleets on the road in the form of big beautiful city busses. Just last year the city bus fleet was ragged, its been upgraded by Chinese manufacturers like Golden Dragon.

Shopping malls are all over the place. Kazan actually has more shopping malls per capita than Paris. We ate lunch at a shopping mall food court at a Russian fast food chain ironically named CCCP (translated as USSR). I asked the guys if this was offensive or threatening to anyone. Nope, they said, they Soviet era has been relegated to nostalgia by modern capitalism that is fueling the country’s growth. CCCP now is simply a fast food joint serving the world’s biggest brand, Coca-Cola.

You can’t help but notice how IT oriented the city is. One of the things I trumpet about Kazan is that there are more than 20 universities, most of them technical. This is a university town graduating the next generation of computer programmers annually. Kazan, and Russia as a whole has a culture of IT. The coolest job you can have is a computer programmer. Being high tech opens the doors of opportunity, including working at Google in St. Petersburg, or eventually working in the US if you are good enough.

Billboards around the city advertise HP desktops and laptops. The government has just invested in a beautiful IT startup “IDEA Park” to provide office space to startups complete with furnished desks and computers. The rent is discounted 50% for winners of an annual business plan competition.

Two years ago Fujitsu moved an entire office from the UK to Kazan through a partnership with a Russian based IT company, ICL. Since then, IBM has moved in and is partnering with Kazan State University and there were rumors when I was there that Microsoft is next and that top talent is starting to be recruited by Microsoft.

I can’t wait to see what Kazan looks like next year. One thing is for sure, the Flatsourcing office will have quadrupled in size and we’ll be hiring more!

Finally, the hottest gadget in Russia by far is the iPhone. I brought three of them over for Oleg, Alex, and Timur and they were promptly unlocked and filled with some of the most amazing software that we’ll learn about over here in the near future. I ended up leaving my personal one behind as well. Even though carriers don’t sell them yet, and they go for upwards of $800 on the black market, our last night there we were surprised to see the women at the two tables on either side of us to be taking pictures of each other with their iPhones. An apt metaphor for falling borders in this ever-flattening world!

Back in the heyday of the NBA I used to love watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. No matter what kind of game MJ was having, Phil Jackson would rest him at the end of the third quarter and for the first few minutes in the fourth. He’d come off the bench rested and ready, and go on to do the most amazing things I’d never seen basketball court, more often than not leading the Bulls to victory.

And sometime during the fourth quarter, Marv Albert would remark “he lets the game come to him.”

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you have to let the game come to you. Things don’t always move as quickly as you want. Software doesn’t get developed overnight. Search engine rankings take time. And user adoption of your product doesn’t happen overnight.

About a month ago I felt myself pressing. I was pressing too hard to get siteMighty to the next level. I was pressing too hard on my team, our partners, and our business model. I realized this one night when I literally laid in bed all night with my mind racing and unable to sleep. I was pressing too hard.

So I made the decision to step back. I let the team step forward on siteMighty, and instead of trying to press so hard to grow fast, let things take their natural course for a while. We have a fully developed product, our users like it and are finding success with it, and we have a great team behind it at supporting it.

It was an incredibly freeing moment when I realized I could take a break from siteMighty and stop pressing so hard.

So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’ve been focusing my energy on building the business infrastructure for Flatsourcing which has been going incredibly well, and is something thats been waiting for my attention for a long time.

And today I realized that the game was coming to me.

• A good friend of mine signed up for an account with siteMighty and gave me some great feedback on it.
• I looked in on our support tickets and stats that I’ve been purposely ignoring for the last couple weeks. They’ve been handled excellently by our support team.
• Today we received a revenue-share check from a partner it was literally 10x what it was last month. That means we’re growing but more importantly our users are growing. Wow, if that’s what stepping away will do, I’m heading to Panama.
• Most of all, I’ve been having fun again.

Letting the game come to you feels great. Pressing too hard feels stressful. It’s a lesson in entrepreneurship and I won’t take lightly.

Thanks for the life lesson MJ.

So we’ve been working hard on the redesign for Flatsourcing.com and really thinking about what are goals are with the site. It is going to be a Wordpress-based platform, but it needs to function as more than just a blog. We asked ourselves what we are trying to accomplish with the site (I know, a rarity that we actually think about our goals before plunging headlong into design, I should have been doing this years ago):

1. First and foremost, we are soliciting business for Flatsourcing, so we need to both communicate what we do, and enable visitors to the site to easily contact us.
2. We are communicating both our skills, but more importantly, demisifying and personalizing outsourcing. We want to use social media (twitter, video, profiles on LinkedIn & Facebook) to enable clients and potential clients to really get to know our team in Kazan. We need to put a face on the business over there, and bridge the cultural, time, and geographical distances to bring our team as close as we can to our clients.
3. We want to make sure that our current clients have the tools they need to work with us. They will have an (eventually private) area to login to with access to all the tools we use. Basecamp for project management, Freshbooks for invoicing, Skype for voice chat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect for video conferencing.
4. We want to communicate our expertise in our field. We’ll do this through the blog, so that the site is a living breathing expression of what Flatsourcing is, not just a corporate presence placeholder.

So, with those goals in mind, we drew up mockups for the design of the site on both sides, New Orleans & Kazan. I’ve included the pictures below. Are we on the right track? What would you like to see from us on Flatsourcing.com?

Today, Oleg and I started discussing the redesign for Flatsourcing.com. This is a project that has been in the works for while for us, and now are focusing our resources on get it up and running.

The redesign is the last step in the full launch of our Flatsourcing Web Services. We’ve been hard at work over the last several months refining our processes and adding new clients. This is been a lot of fun, and we’ve found tools that work for us, process flows that work for our clients, and most importantly of all have a number of successful and ongoing client relationships under our belt. It’s time to grow!

As we work on the relaunch of Flatsourcing.com, I’ll be live blogging the details of the site design as it unfolds. We’ve been working in a much more integrated manner lately through the help of a very stable web conferencing software, Adobe Acrobat Connect which I highly recommend.

I spent the afternoon today using the mind mapping software MindMeister brainstorming the feature set for our WordPress-based Flatsourcing.com site. It’s embedded below:

As we continue to move forward we’ll be talking about more details of the process. We’d love to hear what you think should be on the site to help us communicate what we do. Hit me up in the comments.

What happens when location doesn’t matter, communication is instant, and we are all connected through the Internet? New business opportunities abound.

The New York Times had two interesting articles on outsourcing in their small business section on Tuesday. The first, a review of two Indian virtual personal assistant (VPA) firms was interesting. But the second one really caught my attention, the story of a company that provides tech support Yonkers, NY businesses from Bogotá, Colombia.

Etectonics is a company that has taken all operations that can be virtualized and located them in Bogotá, while maintaining a feet-on-the-street tech support in Yonkers. The interesting part of this is that for all intents and purposes the company is actually based in Bogotá, not in New York.

Outsourcing customer service and help-desk function is hardly novel. But few businesses have gone to Colombia; even fewer small businesses have integrated off-site offices as neatly in their operations as this six-year-old computer service company, which serves around 200 small and midsize businesses in the New York area through a voice-over Internet protocol call to Bogotá and keeps a videoconferencing portal on from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That way, the workers in Colombia, 2,500 miles away from those in Yonkers, can act is if they are in adjoining cubicles.

Interestingly enough, this is much of the same approach that we’ve taken here with Voodoo Ventures and Flatsourcing. When we lost a key team member here in New Orleans this summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to reengineer our company. I examined all of our business functions and found that though we had core competencies with our team here in New Orleans, because this is a knowledge-based business, it made a lot of sense for us to train our Flatsourcing team in Russia on these competencies, and ultimately this was a more scalable solution for us than hiring additional staff here in New Orleans.

The factors in this decision for me really turned inside out the way I think about our business.

• Our team in Russia all have masters degrees in computer science and recruiting additional team members is much easier there than it is here in New Orleans.
• Flatsourcing built siteMighty. This simple fact means that support for siteMighty is handled closer to the developers responsible for it by locating our support team in Russia. We reserved a New Orleans-based Skype phone number that actually rings to our support team leader, Dilyara, in Russia. Call us @ 504-717-4717.
• We time shifted our office hours so that our Flatsourcing Russian office overlaps with our clients in the UK, South Africa, and the US. Coverage isn’t 24/7 yet, but we’re moving that direction.
• Knowledge is transferable. Rather than hiring a SEO/PPC manager here and training them, and after a bad experience with outsourcing this to a Florida-based company, I made the decision to work through training these processes with our Flatsourcing team. After a few months of work on our projects, this will actually be a service that we can market to clients.

So, interestingly, we now are very much a US-based company, where most of our work is done virtually in Russia. At this point I’m the only member of the team here in the US, and we have anywhere between eight and 12 staff members in Russia. And after a few months of training in transition, we’re firing on all cylinders like never before. It’s amazing how flat world is.

VentureBeat reports that Draper Fisher Jurvetson is heading to Russia:

Besides Russia, the fund, called DFJ-VTB Aurora, will invest in the neighboring Commonwealth of Independent States, including Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine (home of another DFJ fund), and others. The fund plans to invest between $2 million and $16 million per company.

Initially, DFJ is not contributing directly to the fund. But, by helping pick companies, it will have the opportunity to co-invest in them down the line. Half of the money will come from the Russian government and twenty percent from the European Bank of Development and Reconstruction.

Thousands of highly-educated engineers and scientists in the region have the skill, talent and motivation to build big companies, said DFJ’s managing director in Russia, Don Wood, in an interview with VentureBeat — they just haven’t had the resources or role models to do so, he says.

This is great to see VC getting on board with the technology opportunities in Russia. Oleg, are you ready to start putting a business plan together for Flatsourcing?

We are very pleased to announce the very first BarCamp to be held in Russia. BarCamp Kazan (Russian here) will be held on August 4th, 2007, in Russia, Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan.

This BarCamp conference will coincide with my trip to Russia to visit my colleagues at Flatsourcing, Inc. we are all very excited to bring the “unconference“-style conference to Russia.

Kazan is a city with multiple excellent technical University programs. There are many highly qualified computer scientists and web programmers, and we look forward to this opportunity to bring them together, and share some of our experiences through our last six years of developing our global partnership.

I’m personally excited to host a conference session with my colleague Oleg Kurnosov in which we will share concepts from Thomas Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. This book has had a tremendous impact on us both personally, and provided a blueprint (and name inspiration) for our current joint venture, Flatsourcing Inc.

We want to extend the invitation to anyone and everyone to join us in Kazan August 4 for this BarCamp. The airfare might be a little steep, but we will make sure the conference is free. Thanks to everyone who is helping to put this on. Be sure to read the announcement on the Tatsoft Blog too, (English version here.)

I wrote a post earlier this week about our success in building an outsourcing partnership with our team in Russia. We’ve built a strong partnership with our team, and I mentioned some of our success factors: trust, respect, and team. Today, I want to share a list of more actionable dos and dont’s for building a successful outsourcing partnership.

When you start outsourcing, DO:

1. Write great specs – Have the discipline to clearly define what you want from your outsource partners. Great specs will help you clearly define what you want, and once you have them, communicating what you want it easy.
2. Evaluate references – Check their prior work, talk to their previous clients. Nothing is a better indicator of future success than past performance.
3. Assign a project manager on both ends – Designate one person on each team responsible for all communication between each side. Without clearly defined project managers communication will break down.
4. Make deadlines matter – Let your outsourcing partner give you their estimation of when the project will be completed. Then make this deadline matter by applying financial bonuses for early completion and penalties for late.
5. Agree on communication methods ahead of time – If you will need to talk to them on the phone, make sure everyone agrees to this ahead of time. A mix of email, instant messenger, and a project management tool like Basecamp with occasional Skype calls will probably work out great.
6. Get to know each other personally – Send pictures to each other, hook up a webcam to Skype for videoconferencing. Go see them if you can. Building personal relationships will help you get through the stresses that come with outsourcing.
7. Be a good client – Respect the constraints of your relationship. You probably aren’t their only client. Their time is valuable too. Have the discipline to know what you want, write it down in a clear way, and stick to your own deadlines.
8. Keep the ball in their court – Never let a feedback request or question from them linger in your email inbox. If there is an open issue on your end, it means something is not getting done on their end. Work to keep the ball in their court at all times.
9. Pay on time – Nothing will cause a partnership to go downhill faster than not paying the bills.
10. Remember what you’re in it for – Hopefully you are getting great work at a great price. Outsourcing can be stressful at times, but remember why you are doing it. Outsourcing works.

When you start outsourcing, DON’T:

1. Just go for the cheapest provider – Too many people think outsourcing is just about saving money. Go for the mix of high quality product at a cost that works for you.
2. Be lazy – This goes along with being a good client. If you don’t work hard on your end, they won’t either. The old saying about computers applies: “garbage in, garbage out.”
3. Let the project hit the death spiral – If things seem off course from your end they probably are. You need to take back control of the project. Most often this is caused by a communication breakdown.
4. Rush them – You should have established a project deadline based on their estimate. This is the most realistic delivery date you have. Rushing them will lead to quality problems.
5. Pull the plug – Successful outsourcing is a lot of work. And you’ll learn and grow the more you do it. Don’t pull the plug on the project at the first road bump. Work through it, you’ll be glad you did.

These tips were culled from our experience in working with our team at Flatsourcing. We’d love to hear any of your thoughts and ideas. If I’ve missed something let me know. Good luck and happy outsourcing!