As a startup, you are lucky to make it past a year in business; most don't.
We consider ourselves very lucky; my partner would say luck has nothing to do with it; that we created our own destiny. Whatever the case, I am grateful for surviving a tumultuous year.
In our case, we coded the site ourselves. My partner would say he coded the site and I simply watched his brilliance. Again, whatever the case, we did it ourselves, the site worked and it was functional. As the system slowly scaled, we gained more confidence, more users to the site, and thus we started thinking about hiring a "real" coder to create generation 2.0; those things my partner couldn't figure out on his own... with no help from me.
As a startup not currently making money, this was a very important decision. Do we use our precious capital to make the leap to a better, more robust site, and do we trust some random company to do it?
We did.
The results were what we had envisioned. We partnered with our coders and they delivered the work product we described; albeit slower than we wanted. Despite taking longer than we had anticipated (I am fairly certain most builds take longer than expected), we received a work product we were happy with and one that helped take us to another level. We are proud of what we have built together and we are happy at the growth we have seen in one year's time.
NOW THE DIFFICULT PART...
Can we bring a coder in-house to get the work done faster, and would it be more cost effective to have our own coder do, at the very least, the little things that take too much time (according to us) for our outside coder to do?
You can envision the threshold problem, right?
What happens when something goes wrong?
Our in-house coder tries to integrate her changes from the development site into the production site and something goes wrong, the corporate coder we hired says we did not do it, your coder tried to integrate something onto our site and therefore it is YOUR problem. The potential nightmares from this scenario are endless.
SO WHAT IS ONE TO DO?
We had this exact dilemma. We wanted to move faster. A coder working on our site for 8-12 hours a day. We wanted to be able to sit right next to someone and say change this color, move this margin, try this font... we wanted to tailor the site to our EXACT specifications... at our speed. We wanted that kind of control. So, we decided to be mature about it and have a candid conversation with our current coders about how we could handle it. We described the frustration we had with their speed, or lack thereof. We explained we were certain it was very typical of startups who want things, well... yesterday. They assured us we were unique... and a little ridiculous.
Ultimately, we decided to solve this quandary by having our current coders manage everything that was placed on the site to ensure the sanctity of it, while our in-house person would create the little stuff and tweaks to the system.
It is a very real-life problem that must be dealt with in a mature fashion. Our coders chose to lose a little of the small stuff in exchange for keeping the relationship alive and well... and we are glad they did it.
This post originally appeared on The Whole Magilla and was written by Chris Meyer, co-founder of MagillaLoans.com.
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