Destroying the reputation of Freelancers everywhere
We rely 100% on freelancers and outsourcing to create , build and run the business.
The platform is built on Ruby on Rails running on MySQL and Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon Web Services. Not too complex, but enough to challenge the average freelancer.
Freelancers have a bad reputation for shoddy work, poor quality, taking the money and running and various other evil deeds. This is mostly unfounded and our experience has been excellent so far, as proven by a recent event with our offshore Ruby on Rails dev team based in Serbia.
Besides delivering the work on time and budget as one would expect, the freelancer in question, lets call him ’N’, has been awesome. Late nights spent debugging issues, 30 minute response times day or night, challenging questions about some of our design or dev decisions, a constant awareness of us being in startup mode with suggestions on affordable options to deploy various bits of tech and then two unforgettable incidents.
The first time I knew this was going to be a great relationship was when ’N’ dialed in for our usual Monday evening call and started the conversation with “I was thinking over the weekend that a good way to optimise the user experience would be xx which would positively impact YY in the business”. A simple statement, but the ownership of our product and commitment to our business was clearly demonstrated right here. I’ve worked with many hundreds of freelancers at an enterprise level and have heard lots of talk about ‘partnerships’ but this simple statement did the trick.
The second happened yesterday. We’ve decided to make GetViable free from the end of August 2013 and keep our costs as low as possible while we look for alternate revenue streams. More on this in another post. I called ’N’ to let him know what was happening and, given that this impacts his pocket directly, was very pleasantly surprised by his response.
’N’ said: “I’ve been thinking that the right thing to do here is give you 50% off my last bill (around $700 USD discount) given the situation. I value our relationship and I’m choosing the right thing vs the right business decision. I’m sure we’ll work together again and believe in what GetViable is trying to do.”
Just wow. Speechless, as this is a huge amount of money in Serbia for ‘N’
Like I said, destroying the poor reputation of Freelancers everywhere!
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