Ask HN: How vulnerable am I if I outsource my development to non USA developers?

Filing a lawsuit in a foreign nation costs six figures and up up up, exposes you to the substantial risk of losing due to home court advantage, and gives you the upside that the fly-by-night developer who stole your idea gets told in a very stern tone of voice to please not do it again. It is not a realistic way for you to cover the downside risk of getting your code stolen.

Want good news? Your idea is worthless, so it is no biggie if it gets stolen. The source code produced is likely to be overvalued at "worthless", so if one of your competitors gets a hold of it, you'll quickly be ahead of the game as long as you don't do anything excessively stupid like attempting to use that source code yourself. (You may succeed in getting code with actual value if you're really good at both picking your provider and managing the outsourcing project, which is ahem not a cheap, easy, do-in-your-spare-time endeavor.) No company worth building is at risk of getting knocked off by a cheap outsourcing company -- if all it took was enough monkeys banging on typewriters to make a software company, they'd already be doing it.

My bona fides: managed outsourcing operations for a few teams of a Japanese multinational for a few years.

Thank you for your comment. I understand that idea is worthless, and execution is what matters. While aiming to become a company is indeed a dream for me, but I am taking baby steps. What I want to create is a mobile app, nothing fancy, and see if I can sell the mobile app. Because it's such a simple idea, that's where my fear comes from. I build the idea, outsource to developers to create the mobile app, and at the end, instead of owning my mobile app, the developer is selling my idea of mobile app at AppStore, AppWorld and Android Market. I suffer a potential loss of income. That's what I am afraid of. How vulnerable am I even after the developer signed the NDA and non compete agreement and the developer is not USA based? Of course, I could have tell Apple, Blackberry, and Google to stop the app listing, but that's a long process and during the process, money are going to the developer ways.

What I want to create is a mobile app, nothing fancy, and see if I can sell the mobile app. Because it's such a simple idea, that's where my fear comes from.

If it is a simple idea, and is making money, it will be copied. There's a notion in business called "barriers to entry", and it sounds like you are entering a niche where there are none. You should get comfortable with this notion; it's not the outsourced developer you have to fear.

Personally, I would look for a US based developer that would do it for the amount you have to spend + some equity. You would be surprised how many talented individuals you will attract when they know that you have some skin in the game, the big problem that technical-cofounders have is not that they think every idea is stupid but that they perceive you as just another "I have and idea" guy, when you have some money in they game, they know you are serious and will listen to you. To be honest if you have to worry about money enough to outsource, you probably don't have enough to outsource right and therefore your risk of failure is even higher than a local or at least US based candidate. Adding time zone, cultural and language barriers to the fact that you have no outsourced software development experience is a recipe for disaster. Also I don't mean to be harsh, but if you think yours will be different, it won't the odds are stacked against you and for every one that succeeds there are at least 20 that fail and end up costing 3X the cost that it would have originally cost to have it built with variables that you can manage. Outsourcing takes more management oversight, it is an economies of scale thing, at a certain point a project gets big enough that it is cheaper to hire managers to manage less expensive developers overseas. But just because that recipe works for large projects does not mean that it scales down well. Hiring a manager to manage 1 or 2 overseas developers pretty much negates any cost savings that you would have gained.

You have to be careful which countries can enforce U.S. based NDAs. You will probably need to translate it to a native language and have it notarized by a native lawyer and signed by the individuals (not by the company since that might not work in some cases). This might get expensive.

To kitcar: From what I've saw on the Internet, Eastern Europe has very good developers/hackers if not the best. Probably, I'm just biased here.

> I could have tell Apple, Blackberry, and Google to stop the app listing, but that's a long process and during the process, money are going to the developer ways.

If this is a key point of worry, get the ball rolling for your registered trademark for the exact name that you will appear in the app stores, and confirm that name isn't already taken in the stores, and ideally you can get that name .com/twitterID/facebookID to own your brand.

You can use registered trademark to deny others the app listing by way of your registered trademark status, its straightforward for Apple/Google/Microsoft/et. al. to make a call on app store removal based on trademark infringement.

Regarding development, I've done the same with a startup as you are thinking of with a similar product background, it can be done but the challenges are maybe not what you expect - code theft is not a top concern if you screen correctly. Send me an email, or we can grab a coffee sometime, I'm also in Silicon Valley.

trademark is not an issue, a good analogy would be like a game app (angry birds). Angry birds is available at AppStore and Android Market, but since it's not available in AppWorld for some reason (I think it can be because Angry Birds maker don't want to develop for Blackberry platform? I don't know...), a company copied Angry Birds and create Angry Farms. that's what I am afraid...

My point was you can use trademark as a tool to keep someone from co-opting your exact name if you are not there. For example, I'm not in Windows Phone Market, but I have been able to have someone who used my App's name pulled from market by MSFT because of my registered trademark.

As an entrepreneur, I'm not sure you can do anything about folks trying to compete with you (similar name, similar function), you just have to have a differentiated advantage where folks prefer you to knock-offs. But most folks won't try to copy your name until you are popular and there is a reason to clone you, and attempt to glean off your popularity.

Most outsourced developers are pure rubbish. I cringe when I have to open a project that was outsourced.

At the small level it's fine, but when building larger apps there are just too many barriers to make it efficient.

Including developer programming and communication skills.

Depends on what country you send the work to, and if there is rule of law in that country. Also depends on the amount of money on the line.

If its a big concern, and your project allows it, split the project up into separate modules, each worked on by a separate team - at least that way no single team would have full access to your codebase. The code quality could potentially suffer though, as there would be little consistency in style (unless you establish guidelines and enforce them)

Thank you for your comment. Well, looking at the cost involved, I could possibly going to source it to India, Russia or some eastern european as it's less costly vs if it's USA based.

I thought about the project splitting, and the concern I have is exactly the same as your concern in term of code quality. When it's time to merge them together, it would be a pain if one code section is superior than the other and I would end up clean up the inferior one. And my other concern is that who would merge them together as I am not a developer. I could possibly hire a USA based developer to merge them together after splitting them, that's one possibility. But if that developer ends up cleaning up the inferior one, it would cost more at the end.

I think having them steal the work is the least of your worries, you have to first actually get them to produce a successful product across three platforms. This is something thats challenging to do in-house so good luck making that work when dealing with non-native English speakers working on a different-time zone

You will have to pay above standard outsourced rate in order to ensure that US based contracts et al. apply.

It's called hiring in the USA.