I don't think this is limited to India, we have had plenty of offers of "partnerships" etc from people with ideas. Our response has been to quote a minimum viable product cost and tell them to go find funding.<p>Some have come back to us with a budget and things have been built. But without a dedicated tech team studying the product they have a really tough time.<p>The reason we don't partner is non technical people
<i>always</i> underestimate the work required to build, maintain and grow a product. The equity share on offer is simply not worth the risk but the people with the idea don't see it like that.<p>We've had some great ideas pitched to us too, it has been sad to see the ideas attached to people we didn't want to work with.
ordinarily, I wouldnt reply to this - but this potentially affects my business, so here goes:<p>You dont need to be a good programmer to build a great software business. There are innumerable instances of non-programmers building great business. And especially while churning out your MVP, you could do much worse than outsourcing your product and instead, driving sales.
There is a bloated sense of elitism in writing your own code - while I certainly subscribe to "once a geek, always a geek" personality, the insistence that the CEO/CFO/CXO should be a coder is not entirely healthy.<p>I run an outsourcing business and our first few (and currently one) customer are Silicon Valley startups, some of which got acquired in the course of time. And we are not expensive - the lowest we have gone is 1/3rd the silicon valley salary rate for a 10 year experienced engineer (this was when the project was large enough).<p>As far as India is concerned, I have had an interesting discussion with @plinkplonk over here - India has orders of magnitude more people and engineers than most other countries. So yes, there is a high signal-to-noise ratio to finding people... not unusual in any large economy.
When comparing skill levels to countries like Eastern Europe, I will admit you have a better chance of finding good engineers there, just because you need to be very good to be able to make money like that. [[ Read what I just wrote AGAIN - I didnt say europeans are better than indians in general. I said YOU would have a better chance at finding them in a smaller place.]]<p>I wouldnt presume to go and tell you how to go and find your employees/outsourcing partners, but remember this: At the end of the day, India has a huge talent pool - in this day of an overheated Silicon Valley/NY job market, how do you go about leveraging this talent pool ? Use the fact that a good Indian salary is a fraction of American salary - these are the same people who migrate to silicon valley and pull a Vinod Khosla or Ram Shriram. There is no real truth to the fact that cheap==poor when exchange rates play to your advantage.
Am i the only one here who finds this post a bit immature?<p>Any fairly serious startup needs a good business culture for it to grow and mature, and not just a reliance on technology alone. There have been a lot of tech organizations which crash and burn not because they don't have a good tech team, but because of their lack of business acumen. A look at the US DotCom Bubble should help in this regard.<p>1. When the author starts off with "Indian Startups need to get off their asses and learn to program" he indirectly implies that they don't - without providing any real evidence to back up his assertion.<p>2. The author of the post just bases his generalizations on getting a lot of emails from potential entrepreneurs. Hell, he should just check out craigslist to find a lot of folks with get-rich quick schemes with little to no technical background. The phenomenon of get-rich-quick entrepreneurs in not unique to any one culture.<p>If the author and his team does not want to be shocked by such emails, they should investigate something called a spam filter. It might reduce their shock reactions.<p>3. He draws conclusions like "these folks have no tech capability whatsoever and feel that technology is trivial and can be outsourced."<p>Maybe they do, maybe they don't. One cannot generalize an entire country's tech culture based on a few half-assed emails. I don't consider every nigerian i meet as a scammer.<p>4. If he has just resorted to gross exaggerations, that would be OK. It's his opinion, and he has every right to it. When he starts by condescendingly suggesting that potential entrepreneurs learn programming and being lazy and wondering why such folks get VC-funding, he seems to come across arrogantly.<p>5. Outsourcing is a part of the global IT landscape, and India, more than any other nation, has benefited enormously from it. Every major IT vendor, from Microsoft to Oracle to Sun to Google has opened indian operations and has hired programmers by the thousands. Does the author imply that these organizations lack a tech culture, since they take advantage of indian outsourcing in a big way? His suggestions seem to suggest that the article's focus is on internet startups, but he does not mention that. He also seems to lump product development with internet-based services.<p>The irony is that the few valid points he makes regarding usability, Simplicity and performance is completely masked by his condescending tone.
I feel problem in India(not sure about other regions) is that more people get into Software/IT for money than for the love of technology. We will be better off leaving technology to people who get it or love doing it. Convincing/asking people to learn to program will hardly produce stellar startups.<p>Then, I think there is no harm for non tech people who see technology more as an enabler than end goal seeking technical expertise outside.
<i>Humans love things that are attractive and shiny</i><p>Offline, some people do, online - it's hard to say.
I used to perfect the look and feel of everything, paying designers and wasting hours adjusting color schemes.
What I learned hard way is people do not care about the design much. I don't have statistics and numbers, but
I am sure the majority of people online do not care much about many fancy things designers like to implement.
The ideal solution is the one that looks and feels STANDARD to anyone who knows how to use ms office or excel.
That's not good news for someone (like me) who likes to put in crazy hours changing fonts, sizes and colors. However, it
looks like that's what it is. Attractive and shiny goes to the intranet. Of course, there is a niche for them
(hardcore/online games), but not in mainstream products.
Most startups in India worth the moniker of "tech-startup" do know how to program. I have visited (as a potential employee) or talked to many founders (as a potential partner) most major revenue earning tech startups in India and I'd say everyone of them had strong programming founders.<p>Yes many startups-founders are clueless and have a world changing the-next-facebook-idea but that happens everywhere, not just in India.<p>I was part of a non-tech startup once and web was just marketing tool for us, we did not want to do the website and its UX ourselves, that would be a waste of our precious time (although we ended up doing it too cos' we were techies at heart). I think we did a mistake by doing it ourselves.<p>So no, all Indian startups do not need to learn how to program and most tech-startups do know how to program.
Is it just me or you also think that the fact that he mentioned and linked to his company 3-4 times in the article shows that the article was written to advertise his infinite beta shop?
There is really no blanket rule that will tell you whether it is good to code it all up by yourself or get it outsourced. Depends really on what is your shortest route to market at a reasonable cost. Trying to second-guess it from the outside is a good, but pointless, exercise.<p>Try the flip side of the question - how many Indian start-ups would have failed or succeeded if they all built and deployed their stacks on their own?
What is wrong with "outsourcing" things that don't fall into your area of expertise? As far as I'm concerned, a biz savvy guy "outsourcing" his tech job for a fee is not very different from buying toothpaste from the market because I don't know how to make a good one myself ... or like consulting a dentist to figure out which toothpaste is good for me.