An hour or two after posting the job (for developing my Facebook application) on Elance the bids started coming in. I got 7 proposals, all from the “India/Southern Asia” region. It was easy enough to spot the serious proposals, with good feedback, strong ratings and a good earnings history. It also quickly became apparent that my asking price of under $500 was probably too low if I wanted to get someone who knew what they were doing.
After a day or two of careful review and discussion via email I went with a group of developers called Pure, who are based in Pakistan. We agreed on $800 (€560 when I paid) for two weeks work to build the application. It was a slightly higher price than the average bid, but I was impressed with some of the other applications in their portfolio and felt that it was worth the extra few bob (€100).
The two weeks flew by. Doing it over Christmas worked out really well, they started on the 23rd December so I was off work and had spare time to dedicate to the project.
The time & language difference was no problem, but the cultural differences did have some hilarious results. Here’s some screenshots of the sample discussions they made to test the application: (click to enlarge)
I don't think they like Indians
Ahhh Love
Such harmfulness
And when I made the mistake of asking a friend to try it out he just took the piss, but I don’t think they got the sarcasm:
I was in constant communication with them, testing and giving feedback to them every day. They finished the project and sent me over the source code late last week and I have been busy putting it up on my own server (hosted with Blacknight thanks to their twitter giveaway!)
I’ve been fine tuning it over the weekend and it should be ready to go later this evening. I’ll post the link and would love if you could try it out and give me some feedback.