Ask YC: Cloud-Outsourcing, Cloud-Offshoring - what do you think?
Not just for startups, but for small businesses or even for mid size businesses that are short on IT resources but do not want to hire full time or even hire a contractor for a month.
The problem with sites like ELance, Rentacoder and even ODesk etc. is that you have to add a bid, wait for people to respond, take a guess at which one would be able to do a good job, and hope that the work will happen. Most people that have used it will say they have had bad experiences at some time or another - quite often many times.
So here's the concept that I am hoping to implement. Let's call it "cloud-outsourcing" or "cloud-offshoring". A similar concept to cloud-computing (amazon ec2, s3 etc.), the concept is to outsource to a cloud - whether the job is small or large (2 hours, 2 days or 20 months), you can outsource/offshore the work to the cloud and only pay for the work done finally. You don't pay if nothing's used, and you only pay when it's done.
-- will you use it for that 10 hour thing you want done -- will you use it for that 10 day thing you want done -- cloud-computing is based on processing/bandwidth/storage etc. which are consistent parameters, how would you price this service ?
The reason I'm bringing this up is that I specialize in outsourced/offshore development, have a fully offshore team which is very reliable but I always feel people have a hard time finding other developers to go to when they need it and they may not always need a contractor for 6 months and may not need a person all day, they may need someone 2 hours a day for a month and there is no reliable and easy way of getting that kind of help.
Thoughts ? How would you want to use such a service if you had the need ? What tools would this need, what would make you comfortable trusting something like this (if it was not amazon that created ec2, i'm sure the startup would have a hard time getting adoption, hence the question)
Thank you.