I was at MinneBar this weekend and was in a session where the speaker was talking about how he built a website while on the bus and in his off hours. It was good insight about what it takes to succeed but then towards the end of the session it was pretty eye opening to hear the questions from the crowd. It seemed that this type of work was foreign to them, how’d you find the time? How’d you find the helpers?

I wanted to share my thoughts and let you know that I’m currently outsourcing as much as possible using tools like oDesk.com and scriptLance.com. There are many other sites out there to outsource work to like guru.com, elance.com, rentacoder.com, freelancer.com etc. but the ones I like best are oDesk.com and scriptlance.com.

SCRIPTLANCE.COM

What I like about scriptlance.com is that I’ve only had 1 bad experience and I’ve been using the site for over 3 years. It’s a simple enough interface and could be slicker but it really is a nuts and bolts type of site. The key in working with sites like these are that you get to be extremely clear about what you need and if you’re not your project will get compromised.

Here’s an example, one project I was working on asked the programmer to research 50 items for me. He came back with 100 items and wanted to get paid double the money or asked for a bonus. It was a frustrating spot to be in but at scriptlance.com you put the money into an escrow account and you agree on a price before the project begins so I told this person that I was sorry but I will only pay for what we agreed upon.

ODESK.COM

All these sites are pretty much the same and oDesk.com is not that much different but this site does have one cool feature and that’s the availability to see what your programmer is working on because it takes a picture of them working every few minutes. Very cool to make sure that you’re getting what you paid for.