Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name
is Eric and I make apps. Now this week, I
want to talk about "Working with Remote
Teams".
Alright, so a few months ago I got a call
from a salesperson and he was selling
something. I think it was like
advertising space or something like
that. I can't remember exactly what he
was selling, but he said something that was
really funny. He said, "Our
company covers the Oxfordshire
area and we were looking at Wantage and
since you're like one of the
biggest companies in Wantage,
we thought we should reach out to you,
and I laughed because I said "We're one of
the biggest companies and wantage," and I
said "Dude, it's just me.
You know this is a one-person
company." And it made me
laugh because then he says, he tried to
cover up for it. "Oh! well your website
looks like it's a it's a much bigger
company. Oh so I guess you don't need..."
whatever it was he needed. And so I
said "No", thanked him and he went away,
right? So now the truth is... Overpass is
not just a one person company, but I am
being like the one employee. So what we
we have is like a remote team. So
which is the way that I prefer to do
things.The way I prefer to do things all
the way through, and my whole vision for
Overpass when starting out all those
years ago was to be completely
remote. You know not have.... you know I
don't have any interest in being the
boss. You know the reason I say "I make
apps" and I'm not the president and
founder of Overpass is because I'm more
concerned with producing software. I
wanna keep the production of
apps going out there and try to bring in
revenue that way, and even when we do
stuff for clients,
I'm more concerned with actually
producing the software and keeping costs
as low as we can. So at the moment, we
have a team of 5 and you know
most people are...they're all working
from home. Mostly in the
Philippines, but what I thought I do this
week is kinda go through some of the
ways that we set up this remote team and
some of the failures that I've had in
the past because man I've had loads,
right? It's almost funny
because you know the amount of people who
told me over the years said "Why don't
you just hire somebody local?" And you
know and it's been like trial and error
to get things working, to get things
running as smoothly as they are now. And
right now, I am in an office. So I do
have an office
in Wantage, above the shop. And the reason
I moved from my home into the office was,
it wasn't so much because it was hard to
work at home. It was more like I got the
feeling that everyone was getting tired
of me being there all the time. So I
moved into an office, and occasionally
clients will come in or even people
just you know we'll just come in and
they'll have their app idea, and usually
I mean this office has just become
my space. So I'll be like there's
crumbs everywhere. I'll be kicking like
amazon boxes under the desk and trying
to tidy up real quick, but you know for
the most part it's just a place that I
could go and work and be
interrupted, and you know from
morning till night and all
that kind of stuff, and it's really
really nice. However, so
there's been like 3 ways over the
years that I worked with remote
developers, and it has been various
levels of success. The first one
is something we use all the time, and you
might do as well is to hire like a
freelancer from something like you know
Odesk or it used to be oDesk or Elance and now it's
just Upwork, and that's really good for
like if you're going to get somebody for
like a short-term project.Like a couple
weeks ago, I hired an Indonesian voice
actor to read some of the lines on one
of our games Indonesian Bubble Bath
which came out a few weeks ago, and will
do that a lot especially for translation
work. Even development work for really
small projects. So it's really hard to
find somebody who's really skilled,
but has like a big chunk of time to put
aside for something like that so. And Upwork
it's had its ups and downs. For the
most part it's been okay for me but
I stick to translation and voice
acting. When I've done it with
development, it hasn't gone well but
that's you know that's just finding the
right people. I mean, there's a lot of
trial and error there. The nice thing
about Upwork is that you have
reviews for most people, so like if you're gonna
hire somebody, you can see what other
people said about them before you
actually leave a review. My biggest
problem with that was I think
when we first started, we get a game
called Agent X. We have a game called
Agent X, and I found an artist who
did like really good graphics on it and
he made all
the stills, and we have like a comic book
type of thing and he was really good.
His name was Francisco Maldonado. I highly
recommend him, but he didn't know how to
do like the sprites. So sprites are
the animation. So we have one scene where
what we have the agents running and
I just wanted silhouettes to keep it
easy, and I hired a designer. He was in
the Philippines for the short job
and he spent ages. He was like 2 or
3 or 4 weeks overdue with it, so
we're just waiting for these days
running sprites, and ideally what I
wanted was running, jumping, diving, that
kind of stuff. I finally got a running
man sprite, and it was terrible. It didn't
even jell right. It was just like you
know like when I ran it through you know
the code and everything, he wasn't even
running. There was major frame skipping
and all that kind of stuff. In the end, I
had to hire somebody else and in the
second time it wasn't that good either.
Yeah a few years later, we got a redone
by one of our permanent developers and
then it went okay, but yeah Upwork could be
like a mixed bag, but the nice thing is
you have those reviews and for like
small projects that's really good.
Now the second way that we've done
offshore teams is actually having a
dedicated team overseas. So my first
team doing apps was an
Indian development team, and
again some people will say, well
Indian development companies are you
know bad or they're good or whatever, and
it really is. You know a good developer is
a good developer, no matter where
they are. You got good
developers in India. You got bad
developers in India. You got good
developers in the Philippines
or in England or whatever and you got
bad developers too, and you really have to...
it takes awhile to find good people.
So but this one company, it was like a
dedicated team so they said Okay,
we'll give you like a ....I think it
was 4 dedicated people for the month
for this amount, and then so yeah I
think at one point I had 7 people in
this team and it went okay, but they
just didn't have a lot of
experience like they didn't know certain
things, so I would give them like, I'll
give them things to read or I'll give
them courses to take and so they would
to build up their skills a little bit,
and I'll tell you after 3 months of
having this team, they raised the
prices on me. The development company did.
So basically what I was doing was
building the knowledge of this team. That
knowledge, that
growth didn't actually belonged to my
company because it was part of another
team, so they raised the price. I argued
and then but I went with it anyway
because it was such a low price to begin
with, and then a few months later they
raised the price again. And at that point
I just left. I just said "Nah! You know
what? I'm not going to do it." which is
actually I think I've done this my 3
rules of outsourcing: Always own the
code, right? Don't ever like
don't ever have your source code with somebody else
that they have that over you that you
can't just walk away from that. So I did,
I walked away and I said "No, I'm not
interested" and then they lowered the
price and then they kept coming
back, and I think I did hire them later
on for some small jobs and
stuff like that, but once the trust was
gone and I think yeah they kept raising
the price. However, that was just this
company. For some people, I'm sure
it works really well, but that was a
really remote team. That wasn't really
how I wanted things to go because that
team was like, it was a group of people
all sitting in an office in their
office in Ahmedabad India, and so
in terms of being a remote team,
the only person remote was me
because I was in England, right? So in
the end that didn't quite work that well,
but you know it worked okay, right? So
a lot of it came down to me
making mistakes, getting people to do the
right things and also realizing that
every bit I invested in their education
was not investing in my company. It was
investing in somebody else's company,
right? So now the third way we do it,
and the way that I prefer to do it, if we
could do it, is just having like
full-time freelancers. So right now, we
have 4 full-time freelancers
in the Philippines. So there
everybody works from home.
They've got schedules that are
varying and I think
I'll do another video about how we work
that cause that's been a lot of
ups and downs there too. So what I'll do
is hire somebody and like I said a
full-time person. So like you know
the person who has been with me the
longest is Sandee, our designer, she's
been with me for over 2 years, and it
was so hard to find a designer in the
early days of app development.
That's the one thing I can't do that you
know once we found Sandee, we just
kept her, but you know for these 4
people I must have hired like you know I must
have hired about 20 people over the
years, and it's getting faster
where you get burned a lot
when you do this kind of thing.
People will like say you know
you've been scammed or cheated
or whatever. And it's one of these things
where in my mind you have to
go through 5 or 6 people to find
a really good person. So like 3
weeks ago, I hired somebody. I hired them
on a temporary basis for a week to see
as a trial. I always pay in the beginning.
That's of one of the things with
the with overseas developers is you
know a lot of times they don't get paid
so there's a lot of mistrust there,
so I think I'll just I'll pay in advance,
right? I'm gonna pay you for the next week, if
it works out we'll do another week and
then we can go to monthly, right? So I
always pay in the beginning, so that way
you know there's no reason to hold back
and it's their job to lose, right? So I
hired a guy on...I hired him, he started on a
Monday, I let him go on a Tuesday, right?
It was that was that quickly, whereas
before in the early days I've actually
had people for like 6-7 weeks,
sometimes even a few months and then
realize this guy's not going
anywhere, and it was sort of growing as I
go.
It was like you try to think "Well,
he says he's working on it. He
hasn't checked in the code in a while",
but yeah I just need to get him to check
in and stuff like that. It's just really
hard to get to push forward on there.
So and I've had developers who I've
hired and they'll be working and
I'll give them a course and they
learn like Corona SDK was with Lua which
is something that I couldn't find a good
developer on so I hired a
guy. He took this course and then pretty
soon I went back to this jobs website
that I hired him from and I did a search,
and then I found a bunch of people with
this skill, right? I went back and looked
at it, and it was this guy, right? He used
different names. He had the same picture for
everyone or different pictures
like one
was his graduation picture, one was his
you know like other pictures. There
was a bunch of him so I thought "God this guy,
he's got like multiple profiles. He's probably
working multiple jobs that's why he's so
slow." In retrospect you know this kind of
stuff you know it was a hard
learning lesson, right? It was hard lesson
to learn like to make sure that if
you hire somebody on a full-time basis
you make sure that they're not working
multiple jobs because you know I've had
people who seem to assume they can work
3 full-time jobs by 8 hour days
which you know you actually can't. So in
the end, I fired him and
he pleaded with me said "No, no, those were
just just in case those profiles..." Oh
the other one so it's a bunch of him and
there was one of a young lady. I
looked at it but it looked a lot like
the same skills that this other guy just
gained, so I went and looked at. I did a
search of her name, it came over the
Facebook page and click on the Facebook
page and there's a picture of her with
this guy. So this guy Louie. Oh it was a
really bad experience. That was one
of those ones where you just want to
check in the towel, but you know like I
said you have to go through a lot of
these. I mean I talked to a lot of people
who say "Oh yeah we tried out offshoring,
we tried outsourcing and it just didn't
work, right? You still get the
same quality as you do is to get
somebody locally." and right? And a lot
of the times it doesn't work, but you
have to keep going through there. It's
trial and error, right? If I could go
through 5 or 6 people but
I can find somebody really well that I
really work well with and they can
help, you know we can just keep turning
out these apps, to keep doing this kind
of stuff then that's really beneficial
to me so. So anyway, so that's it for this
week. I just wanna talk about those 3
ways. There's Upwork, there's a dedicated
team or through another company like
say another development company and
then there's hiring freelancers to work on
their own. My preference is hiring
freelancers at the moment, although
we do still do work with
like with development companies, right?
because it's if we have a big client
project, we'll go with them. It's
because it's easier than trying to
find the right people at the right time
or if my developers are already
too busy and I like the idea that
everybody works from home, right? So I
spent too many years like putting on a
suit, getting on a train, going into
London, sitting on a desk, doing a job
that I could easily have done from home
and have more family time, and even when
we do like Google Hangouts and meetings
you could hear like kids in the
background and stuff like that which you
know which I don't mind. I actually kinda
like that. I like the idea that you know
I could get somebody who's happy working
from home and as long as they produce. My
whole thing is not to look professional.
I want to execute. I want to
produce more software, and that's
really the bottom line for me. I
don't want to be the boss.
I just want Overpass to keep producing
apps and I want to keep that revenue
coming in. So that's it for this week. A
bit long-winded. I think next week what I
might do is talk about some of the tools
that we use with the remote team. Now I
know remote teams is not something
that's specifically app related so
let me know if you'd rather we go back
to AdMob or something like that, but this
is something that as your app gets
bigger, it becomes more difficult to do
everything on your own and you need that.
You need help and you know one of the
ways you can do that is by hiring a few
freelancers to work for you on a
regular basis. So that's it for this
week. I hope it's been helpful so don't
forget to Like, Subscribe and Comment, and
you know that's it. I'll talk to you next
week!