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On March 3, 2017, The LAB Miami hosted BrainfoodMIA speaker Mary Biggins, the co-founder of the MealPal. Throughout the interview, there was a multitude of topics discussed regarding her business. One of the most prominent was the outsourcing of jobs to find cheap software developers. By outsourcing software development, entrepreneurs avoid worries with choosing the correct technology, spending nights and days coding, product testing and so on. Working with a vendor company or a team allows the entrepreneur to concentrate on working out decent marketing strategies, looking for investors, or inventing new ingenious ideas.
Biggins, and many other entrepreneurs who choose offshore developers faced some of the difficulties of having many offshore development teams across the globe. Being unable to get in contact with everyone at the same time was a challenge for the company. Other difficulties include inadequate transparency, trust issues, and potentially a lack of authenticity in the work provided. Meal Pal is not the only startup to put this idea into practice, many other successful businesses (i.e Skype, Slack, Alibaba) have used the same method of offshore outsourcing to help reduce cost and increase efficiency during the beginning stages of a startup.
However, Biggins is a veteran entrepreneur and having previously founded the startup ClassPass, knew that going offshore for developers would be the most cost effective way to startup MealPal. She described the first launch of MealPal as “embarrassing”, but then followed up with the statement “that’s how it should be”. With previous experience in the venture ClassPass, she learned from her original mistakes of rushing into the market with too many features without having an actual desire for the product. The trend of outsourcing offshore developers is one that continues to become more and more viable in the entrepreneurial world of startups, and it is very captivating to see how such a trend affects the startups from the Miami community.
As always we hope you continue to learn, act and build with the LAB Miami.
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