Business Strategy by Achaeus

Hi everyone

We are looking for a new internet product. And, like all of you, we don’t want to do the gruntwork. Now, I have absolutely no doubt that researching a new product is the most critical job - get this wrong and you’re stuffed.

So we spent literally days on the brief for our outsource talent. It took longer and was harder to do than we thought. The brief ended up being 1.5 pages. What a concentration of energy and thought!

Here is the structure that we used:

Purpose, what is required?, the ideal contractor will look like…, specific talent required, timeframe, report requirements, reference resources.

We posted the contract for 7 days on rentacoder.com, elance.com and guru.com. Guru and elance tend to focus more on quality and ratings. We had 16 responses - most of our responses came from rentacoder and were based in the US.

Then we prepared a table listing the bids against a set of criteria like:

done similar work, their ratings, experience, specialised in research, bad feedback, price.

We picked the top 2 , did a little more work and made a selection.

We spent a lot of time on this but the outcome is critical to our success. If your brief is sloppy the result will be sloppy. These contractors cannot read minds. Clear written communication is EVERYTHING. It’s not like having someone in your office where you can tic tac every few hours.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Gail