Let’s get down to business.
Foreign article
If you plan to accept foreign software outsourcing, it is best to master the following skills in advance:
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Basic English communication skills (able to communicate with a third brother)
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Good planning skills (take time difference into account)
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Financial management ability (tax declaration and collection cycle management)
freelancer
If you’re looking to get into the outsourcing business abroad and compete with Asan, there’s no way around freelancer.
Freelancer is the most influential freelancer and crowdsourcing platform in the world. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company has more than 40 million employers and freelancers in more than 240 countries. From software design, development and testing to marketing, accounting and legal services, you can find partners on the site, and their business covers a wide range of areas.
In addition, freelancer, with deep pockets, is constantly acquiring some high-quality outsourcing markets to further expand its scale and slowly encroaching on the whole market.
However, as a listed company, freelancer’s share price has been falling for the past six months… Specific reasons in this is not much to do the analysis, after all, the path of growth of programmers public number is not recommended platform.
In terms of platform size and market share alone, Freelancer is a platform for some of the best freelancers in the world today. If you are planning to work on this platform, you should be confident in your overall ability.
upwork
Upwork, formerly elance-Odesk, is a major competitor in Freelancer, and the two are often compared.
Founded around 1999 by MIT graduates, the company has changed its name a total of four times (Elance, oDesk, Elance-Odesk, Upwork), perhaps in response to the rapidly changing industry of information technology.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company has 12 million freelancers and 5 million clients registered on its online platform, with a valuation of $1 billion, making it the most valued freelancing platform in the world.
As with Freelancer, a variety of different industries are served on the platform, not just software outsourcing. Big names like Microsoft and Airbnb have partnered with UpWork.
According to various data, the scale of Upwork is no less than that of Freelancer. “Cast a wide net, collect more fish and choose the best ones”. If you want to receive more high-quality orders, you should not be limited to one platform.
Fiverr
https://www.fiverr.com/
Like Freelancer, Fiverr was founded in 2010, but it’s a smaller business that focuses on writing, translation, graphic design, video editing and software programming.
Fiverr became a top 100 site in the US and a top 200 site in the world within three years of its launch. The next year, Fiverr raised $30 million in funding and quickly gained market share. Finally, in June 2019, he was listed on the NYSE.
While Fiverr doesn’t offer a wide range of services, its software programming niche is quite specific:
As we can see from the above, everything from website building, mobile & desktop App development, data analysis, user testing, as long as you are engaged in software professional developers, there is a place for you.
So take stock of your tech stack and get excited!
Domestic article
After introducing the mainstream single platform abroad, let’s talk about the domestic one.
Facing domestic enterprises to accept orders, the main advantage is not so high requirements for English communication skills, but the customer bullshit, do not understand pretend to understand, demand change back and forth, like blind BB, long collection cycle problem is also widespread.
Therefore, I personally think that you should pay most attention to the following ability when you meet the basic technical ability of receiving orders in the domestic market:
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Business communication skills (manage customers’ expectations)
If customer expectations are not well managed, projects are prone to problems. The most common situation is information asymmetry: the client thinks that if you give more money, you do less work; Or you do a lot of work, but you don’t see the product, etc.
Pits like this, and a bunch of them. Limited by space, I will not discuss in detail here. I will share the new opening article with you later.
Next we come back to talk about a few more reliable single platform.
Code,
https://codemart.com/
As China’s first one-stop cloud software service platform, you can easily think of Coding as the Chinese version of GitHub, although that is not what they aim to do.
Founded in February 2014 in Shenzhen, Coding currently has 1 million users, 7,000 + enterprises, 1.7 million hosting projects and a total of 25 million US dollars in capital financing.
Personally, I should have contacted Coding around 2015, when I was impressed by the fresh and elegant UI of their website, because Coding is one of the few products that use Semantic UI for front-end development in China. In an era when Bootstrap is widely used, it takes a lot of courage to choose a new front-end framework that is still in beta.
A few years ago, I was fortunate to read several articles written by Coding founder Hailong Zhang, including “How to Value software Development Projects?” “, “Why to be a Good Party A”, “Reshaping Software Outsourcing in the Era of On-demand economy” and many other articles related to software outsourcing.
After reading the book, I was deeply inspired to think that Boss Zhang should be a small group of people with a unique understanding of the domestic and foreign package industry.
One of Coding’s products, Code-Marketplace, was spearheaded by the founders of Coding, which focuses on providing Internet software outsourcing services. At present, on this platform, the accumulated docking outsourcing amount of more than 300 million yuan, more than 10,000 projects, 150,000 developers.
Starting from 15 years ago, it has been more than 4 years since then. It is really not easy to achieve this result only with platform resources.
Two years ago, I published a project on Coding and tried to accept orders. However, due to the special evaluation mechanism of the platform, we did not discuss cooperation, and finally chose offline partners. The talent selection and evaluation mechanism of the specific platform has detailed documentation on its official website, which will not be described here.
If you want to receive orders on the platform, you can improve personal information on the platform, submit applications, and wait for the platform to send orders. However, there are too many uncertain factors, which is a bit like waiting for a chance. The best way is to actively look for customers and write tenders for demanders on the platform. As to can win the bid, that depends on the individual or the team’s comprehensive quality ability.
Open the package
https://zb.oschina.net/
“The vertical technology community has accumulated 3.5 million + active developers’ massive behavioral data in 10 years for intelligent matching”. When opening its official website, the first thing you see is this sentence.
Thanks to the support of the open Source China developer community, their “open source crowdsourcing” products are growing rapidly, and outsourcing services are flourishing.
At present, the platform does not disclose much of the outsourcing transaction amount, but according to my online search, the transaction amount of the platform successfully exceeded 40 million RMB at the end of 2016, just one year after it was launched. Given the steady growth every year, the total volume of the platform should be no less than the “code market” of Coding.
In addition, according to the official website, the number of developers on their platform is quite scary:
There is a search entry for outsourcing projects on the official website. If you have nothing to do, go up and browse, maybe you can meet the outsourcing that suits your appetite.
Programmer’s inn
Finally, let’s talk about programmer inn.
If I remember correctly, the programmer inn started out as a programmer to connect to related websites. Developers can improve their resumes on the platform, and entrepreneurs can hook up with technicians and start businesses together. Later, perhaps their founder sensed a business opportunity and changed it into a software outsourcing docking platform.
At the early stage of the project, in 2015, when I was still a sophomore, I was lucky to receive an email from the founder inviting me to join the project. So I went to their official website and found that the UI of their website editor was rather shabby, so I made some suggestions casually: It could be replaced by Simditor, an open source editor produced by Tower, but the suggestion was eventually adopted. For me at that time, there was a little secretly happy heart.
At the end of the day, I went to work, writing code and learning new techniques, and paid less attention to the programmer. What I didn’t expect was that in the extremely difficult entrepreneurial environment in recent years, they still fought their way through all the difficulties and survived to today. I have a lot of respect for that.
Programmer inn currently accumulated nearly 400,000 registered developers, covering a number of technical fields, a variety of scarce social talents, large factory engineers, can be found above. As long as the money, they will be used by you.
If you can outsource, but don’t have the technology to do it, go up there and hire the technology, believe that this should be the most efficient solution.
My company once before with the programmer had several cooperation on platform, several times, the overall went well, the only shortage is that part of the developer is a part-time program, to work during the day, evening or Saturday day only project to do, so sometimes feedback speed is slow, run back and forth at both ends, some work detail processing is not in place.
This is also something to be aware of. If you are outsourcing on a part-time basis, you’d better make sure that you have enough spare time in addition to your job, otherwise you may end up losing your job and failing to outsource.
Write in the last
With the explosion of information technology in recent years, many software by single units also have sprung up, some of which is no lack of high quality web site, but limited to space, in the list of inconvenience, so only choose a few more representative of the platform, for your reference, if you have contact with other good platform, also welcome in the comments section of communication, Everyone learns from each other.
Finally, I’d like to take a few more pages to talk about some of the things you need to pay attention to when doing outsourcing.
“The world is bustling for profit, the world is bustling for profit,” wherever money goes, it is bound to be crowded, jostling. Software outsourcing this industry is no exception, when we bow into the bureau, will find the presence of monks less awkward situation.
To avoid this awkward situation, you need to expand as many outsourcing channels as possible. Beyond the six sites I mentioned above, you need to dig deeper into the entire software outsourcing industry, reach out to as many outsourcing platforms as possible, and connect with as many people who can bring you clients.
At the same time, don’t forget to build your personal brand, because at the end of the day, the value you can bring from outsourcing is limited, and your personal brand is your greatest asset.
Also, remember the following sentence:
In software outsourcing industry, customer resources are always your most valuable asset.
You don’t have to sell your time to make money when you have a lot of good outsourcing clients on your hands. Hire excellent talents to take charge of the specific development of outsourcing business. You step aside to maintain the relationship with customers and explore more cooperative relationships with customers, such as software copyright sales, product regular technical maintenance & problem consulting, etc.
In this way, it is the right way to do outsourcing, but also the best way to jump out of the code cycle.
It took me a lot of time to collect and sort out all kinds of information in this article today. If it is convenient, please also help to forward more and click on it. I will slowly fill up the follow-up pit as the situation is concerned.
At the end of this article, I wish all the bosses present good health and good fortune in the year of the Rat
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