Outsourcing Challenges of a start-up company

At Tritan Technology we are focused on working with external clients and providing them with the best solutions to their problems. However, often times working with people from around the globe presents challenges. In this article, I will shed more light on what were the main ones we faced when we first started the company.

Our first clients were either small companies or ambitious indie teams from Asia and the United States. As a startup company with no portfolio or big connections, we figured that this is the right way to kick off our business.

Little did we know that working with an indie team can sometimes be as challenging as working with a big corporation.

One of the first challenges that were obvious from the first month was unrealistic expectations or the lack of any expectations in advance. It’s understandable. When an indie team works in a vacuum it’s easy to start assuming everyone understands your idea as well as you do. This cannot be further from the truth.
In reality, if you do not set your expectations clearly as a client, you risk spending your budget on something that is not fully what you wanted. Situations like this lead to unwanted tension between both sides and eventually to terminating production.

At Tritan Technology part of our work is doing scope-based development. Hence if a client is looking for a feature to be added to his already-built project, we can aid him in this effort.

The problem comes when a feature takes no more than one or two months of work. After a couple of small scopes like that, we quickly realized that working in this format brings more cons than pros.

• Having to constantly be on the lookout for potential clients because your contracts end in the next quarter is time-consuming and exhausting. 
• Onboarding and offboarding team members year-round make them much more likely to turn the other way and find a new company to work for.

These are some of the reasons why at the moment our company is looking to establish predominantly long-term relationships with clients.

One of our top priorities is to keep our employees happy with the work environment and the projects that they are working on. That is how we guarantee they will perform at their best.

This does not happen without following our outsourcing policy which drastically decreases the risk of having a non-reliable client. Worth mentioning are several important points:

• Definition of Done – Expectations should be clearly stated from the start. Our team members must be aware of what is expected from them in terms of work and communication.
• Vision / Planning – What are the possibilities for us to build a long-term relationship with the potential client? Does he have a clear vision of what his product and/or company should be like?

If you are just starting your own studio or looking to do it in the near future, keep the aforementioned points in mind. Some deals might sound like a jackpot in the short term but they can negatively influence your growth for the years to come. Focus on your vision and do not let temporary distractions get in your way. Short-term gains will be always tempting, but that’s how you will slow down – invest in stability and persistency.