This makes me laugh



because when you are in the early stages of a start up you really put to use all resources that you have at your disposal. Sometimes it is that friend that built the car from the bathtub.

Ever looked to your friend that does programming or design on a freelance basis to design your website for cheap? We've either done this or considered it.

When I first started out I asked my classmates to help me with designing some of our branding material, asked my brother to do some of the front-end coding and professors to help with business strategy and contacts.

Looking at this comic strip now just reminds me of those things - not that this means I'm not reaching out to the still limited but growing resources that I have worked to build for PeerFX; I think it's economical and sometimes better to reach out to my internal network first before going to the external market for help.

Here's why. I once had an idea to build an online contest website to get the word out there for PeerFX. I went to a couple companies and got a quote and one came back with a price tag of $25,000. This is for a one page flash page that's like a mini-game.

Let's just say when I saw the quote I thought they added an additional zero before the decimal place by mistake. The logic didn't work very well either - this one page mini-game apparently needed 2 project managers and 3 designers and 500 programmers (yes I am exaggerating but you get the idea...)

So that's the reason why it's more economical to look to your internal network because your friends probably won't try anything stupid like this. It can also be more efficient because you won't have a team of 10 people assigned to a one page project and 8 of them playing rocks, papers, scissors for the whole day with nothing to do.

Go Dilbert.