Nickeluli

The summer is finally over (hm… good/or bad?).

Slowly everyone is returning to the office, and the developments of Testfreaks are speeding up again. I’ve had a great summer, with a lot of fun thing. I have been working all summer, and I really need a long vacation. But instead of having a long summer vacation I’ve been planing on going to Thailand over christmas and new year.

This morning when I got back from a week in England with no internet connection I had over 600 mails in my inbox. Most of it was actually spam, but after spending three hours setting actions on the 10% of real mails I had I could finally focus at work.

Working with a decentralized organisation, is very special. And when your going on a vacation you need a way to make sure that work will continue even though I’m not at the office. And thanks to Niel, my team leader on the Philippines I could focus on having a good time with my girlfriend.

In the near future we have decided to make Testfreaks bigger, and we will be hiring new people. Both in Sweden and outside of Sweden. This will ensure a bigger and even greater review site in future. Our focus is still to be the best and biggest review site online, and we are soon there

In the next couple of month we will add a lot of new categories on Testfreaks, and we see great potentials…

Today I took a new step in the working model we have at Testfreaks. As I’ve written before we have a lot of our staff sitting in countries and time zones all over the world. Lately I’ve had too much work to do, and I’ve wanted an assistant for quite some time. Until two weeks ago I’ve been thinking of hiring an assistant here at the office. But that wouldn’t suite our need for availability 24/7, and since most of our programmers are situated in other time zones it would be great with an assistant in another time zone then me that could bridge my work when I’m home sleeping.

I’ve been thinking and drawing a lot on paper on an outsourced way to clone my self, and now I got found the solutions. Some of my programmers have been working with me for more then one year. And today I made the best one team manager of the rest of the team. Our team has grown a lot and is now more then 20 people in 9 different time zones.

It’s an odd feeling of knowing that you could scale your organisation a lot more, but you - yourself are the bottle neck. That’s basically how my work situation have looked like the last couple of month, but from now I will have a lot more time to improve Testfreaks and work more strategic. The business model we have chosen for this project is very interesting and I don’t know of any other big online company that work like us, but please give me a comment if you know of any companies working like this.

I’ve been working with freelancers from all the world for the last 18 month. It’s an easy way to get things done fast. You post your assignments, and then workers may bid on your project. Is not always the cheapest one that are the best, make sure you read the reviews. If a freelancer don’t have reviews from other customers then ask them for work samples so you can decide if they good or not.

After 18 month I can say that we are at the moment experience enormous inflation in the internet economy. The hour rate for a freelancer have raised over 150% in the last year. The amount of people working as freelancers have also increased. China is the country where the prices have increased the most, more then 200% on a year. This is due to Chinese language skills are hard to find and many companies need to translate there sites and texts to Chinese. There is also a problem with more new buyers that don’t really know how much to pay there freelancers per hour.

A majority of all freelancers are situated in India. But I wouldn’t recommend them, hire a Philippine or a Chinese instead. Philippines and Chinese can think for them self, Indian freelancers are so afraid of making wrong so they will end up asking you about everything and that takes a lot of time. Most of the communication is done through different IM softwares (like gtalk, msn, icq, skype, yahoo im).

Today oDesk released an interesting service, where they have based on there freelancers average rate and location have aggregated country specific price maps in google maps. Unfortunately this map will only raise the salaries more, because they aren’t reflecting the reality. I’ve been trying a lot of different sites to find good and competent people, and oDesk is not the cheapest, see list below.

According to oDesk you will have to pay 14$ per hour for a freelancer in India, this is not true. Maybe on oDesk, but if you go to other sites on the net you will find that the rates are often negotiable. If “Bevarn” from India have listed his hourly rate to 15$, you can always talk him down to a much lower salary. But don’t go to low, it should be a win-win situation. You should always pay what you think is fare, there’s no point in forcing people in to slavery.

So for the list of places to buy good services to good prices.

Getafreelancer.com
This is by far the biggest and best site to find good people, most people are situated in India, Pakistan, Philippines and China. Lately unfortunately, I’veca noticed an increase of “gold-diggers” on this site. What I mean is people that have heard they can make good money and promise a lot, but don’t really know anything and can’t deliver.

Getacoder.com
Not that big, seems to be a lot of fictive bids (bids made to look like the site are more active and bigger then it really is). The same people here as you can find on GAF (getafreelancer).

oDesk.com
Big site, good features, lot of people. Here you have an even wider spread of people from all over the world. But regarding the prices and hourly rates shown in the image above it’s not that good.

guru.com
Big American site, here you will find many American working for salaries often far higher then Europe. This is probably a good place to find staff in US, that you want to hire for shorter assignments. There are freelancers from China and India here as well, but they are to expensive to work with.

I know I’ve only mentioned some of the sites, last time I looked (in September) there where more then 100 sites for freelancers. But I can really recommend it, it works fine. But beware of Indians promising more then they can deliver. I work with three Indians and it works well, so of course there exist good ones as well.

Today I launched new categories in several of our sites, we also added Pixmania prices as a complement to shopping.com in UK market.

At the moment there’s a total of 13 viable categories on testfreaks.com, and the new ones from today are in the US.

Xbox360 games
Playstation3 games

In germany we launched

Xbox360 spiele
Playstation3 spiele
Heimkinosystem
Monitore

And in russia we launched

Игры на Playstation3
Игры на XBox360

Next up in US is GPS Navigation, multifunctional printers and more gaming categories. In Sweden we are working hard in gathering new gaming sources so we can launch this here as well. A funny thing hit me, most of the swedish gaming sites have english names.

For those who are more interested in my work, can follow my micro-blogging on Jaiku.

Last weeks I’ve been working with the quality on Testfreaks concerning new products and future categories. And a thing that hit me is the problem with product names and different markets. Since Testfreaks will be launched on several markets we need to keep track on product names on different markets. Same product but different names, and we need to know of this. By giving the product several names in our system we are making this possible, but still - why make this so complicated? Why can’t manufacturer just keep one name on the products.

Another thing that struck me is the lack of good images on products. The big manufacturer like Sony, Pioneer and JVC for examples are good. But most of them are really crap at giving good images on there products. This is particularly a problem with older products, the only good images out there are 100 x 100 this is not worth showing. Do anyone know of any good site with really good product images?

Internet makes the shopping more difficult since you can’t actually touch a product, instead we look at images and read good reviews. So if the manufacturer don’t provide good images, are we just going to skip buying there products? It’s a big focus on new products but there’s also a big secondhand market with consumer electronics, and they are also in need of good images.

And please, all manufacturer that use flash, remove all flash from your pages, since this is impossible to crawl in a good way and the site is much harder to navigate etc. Not to mention extract images from.

Sure, it’s very cheap to use freelancers on the internet but beware of the quality in there work. Of course, most of the people working as freelancers are very good. But as this market grows each day, a lot of non serious persons are entering the market. If you hire freelancers on the internet, make sure that they know what they are doing and they can deliver what you want before you start working with them.

Since we are about to launch Testfreaks soon, I’m handling all the quality checking (with help of freelancers of course). When I look at our competitors on the net, I see that they are more interested in having lots of products with even more reviews rather then a good quality. They have totally missed out on the quality in the service they delivering. On we want the user to comeback over and over again, because of the good quality in our service.

I talked to a friend that needed some help with his php programming and hired an Indian freelancer from one of the big sites. The prgrammer promised to deliver within five days, after five days my friend asked for the finished function but was told he needed another three days. This function was very important for my friend, since his site really needed this upgrade. Nothing happened after three more day, my friend had now lost two weeks of time. Two weeks are a long time on the internet if you should try to keep your regular users. My friend finally gave up and hired a freelancer that I recommended him, and got the job done on two days. Always beware of freelancers that promise a lot and have no feedback from old users. All the mayor big freelancer sites on the net show feedback of there users.

Good luck everyone.

Take a look at our new category page, camcorder reviews.

Last week I started up a new relation with an Indian company that will deliver operators to me. Earlier I’ve been very negative towards Indian outsourcing but I’m on my way to change all this. The Indian people and companies are excellent outsourcing destinations in some areas, and really bad in other areas. I’ve been handling outsourcing here for about a year now, and so far I only had bad experience with Indian programmers. But in the last couple of weeks I’ve been focusing on non programming outsourcing.

I had my first positive experience with Indian outsourcing business four weeks ago, when I hired a new Quality analytics to help me ensure the quality of our work. I told her about my former trouble with Indians, and she told me not to worry. This girl that I found is really good, she works hard and are very eager to learn new things. So last we I decided to test another company that will deliver operators (BPO) to me. At the moment there are two people sitting in Chennai, India. And it works really good!

I will write more about this later, at the moment my team are 20 people in 8 different locations.

I been working with a company in Kiev, Ukraine for about 9 month now. It was actually the first company that we started working with. Today they have seven people working with us, five programmers and two others. I can really recommend the Ukrainian people and the outsourcing industri in the country.

During the last six month I’ve actually had the pleasure to also work with three freelancers from Ukraine as well and they have all performed very well. They always communicate in good english, they deliver on time and they can think for them self.

I went to Kiev in february to visit the company and talk about our new platform for crawling webpages. It turned out to be placed in an old army building with guards at the door. But after the company owner had explained who I was I finally got to see the office. The entire company sat in two small rooms with computers everywhere, and the programmers was all young men from the Kiev university. But they where all very entusiac and with a lot of energy for the new tasks.

The time diffrence to Europe (+1h CET) makes Ukraine to a perfect outsourcing destination for big companies in Europe. The people are well educated and have good english knowledge. I can really recommend you all to try working with Ukraines.

Yesterday I returned to work again, after a short vacation (2 weeks).

Since Testfreaks are almost ready for beta launch (sign up here), there’s a lot of work to do at the moment. Most of my work right now is to ensure the quality of the data we are going to present on Testfreaks.

Hopefully you will love our new review service.

Today at lunch I was finally ready to start work, how is it possible to get that many mails and questions from my freelance team and other people? I was away for two weeks and my colleagues have done some of my work during his time. Still there’s a lot of stuff that I’m behind in the schedule (my own schedule).

Once again I’ve been disappointed when hiring Indian personal, they fail to deliver. So from now on I will never hire another Indian freelancer for work on Testfreaks. Instead I’ve started up a new long-term relation with a programming company in Xi’an, China. They help me with the Chinese part of Testfreaks.

Our plan is to initially launch Testfreaks in Sweden, US, UK, Germany, France and Spain. But there are more market coming right behind, hopefully Russia and China will be next along with Scandinavian markets.