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This is the type of product that really needs a lightweight company to produce it. Sure, the initial sales can probably recover money used to pay a development
by derekp7 9y ago
This is the type of product that really needs a lightweight company to produce it. Sure, the initial sales can probably recover money used to pay a development and design staff, but that doesn't keep their paycheck going indefinitely. In order to employee a decent development team you need to constantly churn out new products, or have a larger product portfolio (which is why Samsung, for example, can still sell smartwatches, because those devs can get assigned to other projects between product revisions).
What Pebble needed to be successful was to have the product design teams completely outsourced from the beginning, so that initial development (and each revision costs) could be budgeted against expected sales, but once that is done, the development team (outsourcer) would then continue work for other customers. Instead of being on Pebble's payroll.
- rerx 9y agoYou may be right, but then the software and general platform would not have been of the same quality for sure.
- derekp7 9y agoI wonder if it would be possible to approach a potential outsource that is growing, with your own team, and have them re-badged to the outsourcer with them dedicated to your project for its duration? Then the outsourcer can re-deploy those resources internally as needed later on. This is kind of what happened at a company I used to work for -- they wanted to outsource IT, but keep their workers employed. So they found a company expanding in the area, re-badged us, and those of us that didn't stay dedicated to the original company after the transition were deployed to other contracts. The outsourcer then got an increase in pre-vetted high quality staff without the whole onboarding expense.