Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool?

23rd September 2013

My answer to What are the pro and cons of outsourcing the coding of an SaaS tool? on Quora

Pros: if you can afford it and are completely incapable of hiring an in-house development team, it will get a version of your software built.

Cons: you’ll quickly discover that building a SaaS product is a process that starts the day you launch it (and start getting feedback from real users). Without in-house developers you won’t be able to iterate on the product, which means you won’t be able to improve it and evolve it in to the product people actually want.

That’s not to say you can’t have your in-house development team based in another country, but you’ll need to learn how to hire and manage that kind of team, which is a massive additional set of challenges—and building a SaaS company is hard enough without making it any harder!