Niklas Hammarstr̦m РNews, Interest, CV

I just love internet and the fact that people are willing to help each other when one is in need of some expert help.

I’m a regular user of GAF where you can buy pratically any service in the world. I found a funny project about a man from sweden that needs help with his math course. It’s basically high school math, algebra and stuff like that.  He’s willing to pay up to 150 USD per month if the person solves his problem (homework) every friday.

I guess the school wouldn’t like this if they knew about it, the fun part is that they probably never will know about it. But for you that want to know about the cheating person, you can read more here.

He includes examples of the homework he need help with.
Math1 (It’s in swedish)
Math2 (It’s in swedish)

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.

One big part of my work is research, since I always need to know how much review sites, and manufacturer that are represented on a market before we enter it. Much of this research (95%) is done by online market researchers. I always try to find local people living in the country, it’s always easier because they often know of these sites before we start the research.

I found it to be very important that the researcher have an interest in the area that they are doing the research. Two weeks ago I gave the exact same project to two researchers, just to see the difference. The result got me to question all my previous research projects. I wanted them to find me as many good review sites as possible in a big Asian country, not China. I told them I didn’t want forum, blogs or any spam sites (MFA).

Person1, lives in US but have language knowledge of the specific country and have a strong interest in all sorts of gadgets, came back with a list of more then 100 review sites.

Person2, lives in India and have worked with online research for four years and and have language knowledge of the specific country, came back with a list of 15 sites and told me there was not possible to find any more sites. And he had been working for a really long time.

I can also tell you that the cost of the research had big difference, person1 cost 150$, person2 cost me 50$. One of the reasons for person1 cost me more is that he’s located in US, but that was something I knew from the start. I just wanted to compare a online researcher from India with a research from US.

When I told person2, that I already had found more then 100 review sites in the country he wanted to try again, and a few days later he sent me a list with all the 100 first sites he had found in Google, mostly crap sites. It was e-commerce sites (without reviews), forum, blogs and other sites that I had no use of at all. I told him to seek work in another work segment. I told him that he had made a bad and sloppy research. Then he told me that I was a very bad buyer that didn’t understood the quality of my work, and then he told me that Americans where much better buyers and never distrusted his research.

At the moment I have 10 projects for market research running in countries all over the world, and I’ve stopped using the cheapest one. On all these projects there where a lot of Indian firms and freelancers bidding on them. But as always I raise a warning for these firms and people, make sure they really have the language skills that are needed and ask them for some kind of examples of research in the specific country.

Good luck with all your online research

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.

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.

When building a site like Testfreaks, and have the aim to launch in 30 markets before the end of 2007, you end up with a lot of linguistic problems. To find freelance people that speak english are no problems, russian is also very easy. But to find good people that speak french, spanish, chinese are more difficult – but not impossible. The impossible task is to find Japanese speaking freelancers, they hardly exists. Currently I have found a company in China that provides me with Pythons programmers that know Chinese, but I’ve been looking for them the last 6 month. It think these will get the job done, the company have also promised to deliver more programmers if I want. I also found a guy living in US, that are a native Japanese, that helps me with some quality checking etc. Since I don’t speak all the languages, I have diffrent accessories that make my job easier, but in the end it’s all about trust between you and the freelancer.

Before found this Chinese-japanese company I’ve been in contact with several companies telling me they can deliver what I want. But they never come through with there promises, and this is the big problem with freelancers on the internet. Okey most of the sites you buy there services on are giving you the opportunity to review freelancers and leave feedback but this is still not working as good as it could. A freelancer could easily manipulate this, that’s why you always need to test the freelancer before you give them the job.

Today I’ve been posting some new assignment on two of the big freelance forums I use. I usually use people that I have been working together with before, but because of what we are working with on Testfreaks I can’t use the same freelancers all the time. Today I’ve talked to this really nice older woman (45+, based on here picture on MSN) about researching on the internet. She’s offering her services for 1$/hour, but as always I’m sceptical to older people using internet. I don’t really know why, I guess the young people are more hungry and eager to make money and therefor willing to work faster. The perfect freelancer that I see it, is a student on a university in Russian, Philipiness, Ukraine or China. Argentina is also a very good place to find talented freelancers.

A lot of people that I meet both IRL and online talk about India as the perfect place to outsource resources to. But I don’t agree to that, I’ve only had problems using people from India. Okey, they are really good programmers and so on, but they suck at thinking for them self. If I don’t provide them with the exact details, like a kitchen recipe for cookies, they are unable to perform my task. Why? All the other outsourcing destinations that I work with can think for them self, but the indians working inside big BPO companies can’t make this work.

Anyway, I’ll have to get back to my research. I will write more about outsourcing and freelancers later.