Should I Program Myself, Or Pay Someone Else?

August 22, 2008

Have you asked yourself this question before? “Should I program myself, or pay someone else?” It is a question asked every day by internet entrepreneurs, and it is a good question. I too had to figure out what direction I would take years ago. In this video I will share some of my thoughts on which direction is best to take, depending on certain your situations.

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To sum it up though, learning how to code can never really be a bad thing for your business. In that knowing an extra skill like PHP and MYSQL for instance will only be benefical to you in the future, and is probably not a bad thing to take a step back and learn some time.

Really if you have a small project, it is general ok to pay a freelancer. But if you want to build a web 2.0 company with some really innovative software unless you plan on doing it right, don’t do it at all.  And if your going to pay and fund a large web 2.0 startup you need to invest alot of money, and hire a team of programmers, and potentially an IT consultant, and vest ownership over several years.  See if you really want to build sometime long-term you’re going to need long-term people, you can just pay someone in another country for $500 to build you something that is going to be bought out for millions of dollars.  Sorry its just not going to work, and I have seen people try to outsource big ideas to cheap freelancers and it almost fails every, single, time…

Trust me a $500 freelancer can’t just build a Tracking202.com and I can’t scale and keep making a better tracking system by paying some rent-a-coder online whenever I need them.  You need long-term employees who will build it, or you need to build it yourself.  If it is a big project, either do it right, hire a team of full-time employees to do it, or build it yourself so you are the system artitect, and later on hire other coders to build off your existing platform.