Imagine you have a design for an iPhone game and have decided to find a contract developer to create it for you. You want top quality and price is secondary. For this reason, you select a company which has developed dozens of applications and seems trustworthy; they’re expensive but you believe in your idea and decide to take the chance. You agree on the terms, sign the contract and development begins.

As you start receiving the builds, everything seems to be working out well; the quality is good and it’s moving in the direction you’ve envisioned. There’s only one small thing: the communication with the company and their responses seem to be oddly slow. You’ve asked them to change the color of a label from white to yellow and it took them 3 days to incorporate the change. Every question you ask seems to go through a committee before getting answered. Somewhere near the end of the project, you come up with a great idea you want implemented and even though it’s very simple, their price for the change is disproportionately high. Yet little by little, the project comes to a finish and you walk away happy with the game in your hands.

The above story is a true one and although it may not sound too strange, there’s quite a lot behind it. The original client had hired a US-based company (let’s call it Company A) with an extensive portfolio and years of experience to create the game. They have then hired an India-based outsourcing company (let’s call it Company B), also with years of experience and dozens of completed projects, to work on the game. Their price was considerably lower than what Company A had charged the client, so Company A was able to keep a decent profit off the project. The story doesn’t end here however, as Company B didn’t have enough developers and has hired us (Company C) to develop the project. Our price was lower than theirs, so they also managed to turn a bit of the profit off the project.

The original client is completely oblivious to all this and still believes that the game is being developed by Company A.

The reason for the slow communication with the client was the fact that all three companies were in different time zones and because e-mail forwarding from client to us and back wasn’t automatic and sometimes it would take a couple of days for someone at Company A or Company B to do it. That is also the reason some very simple changes took so long.

The prices for additional features by the client were unreasonably high because they would start with our request and then both Company B and Company A would add a certain sum to it to increase their profit.

You may wonder what is so dark about this; it’s simple trading where you buy something cheap and sell it at a higher price. Well, not quite. There are several problems here the way I see it:

• The original client believed the game was developed by Company A
• The quality of the service has been considerably lower than it would have been had the client been able to communicate with the developer directly
• The price has been unnecessarily high (I’m not talking 10-20% higher; it was about 5-6 times higher than what we charged for the actual development)

From the perspective of all three ‘development’ companies, there’s nothing to complain about; each turned a profit and moved on. Yet I’d bet you wouldn’t want to be the original client in this case.

Finding trustworthy and reliable developers is difficult and unfortunately, it sometimes takes a few failed projects, wasted money and time. There’s probably no magical formula and it’s always possible to make a mistake; I just wanted to make you aware of cases like this because in the long run, nobody truly benefits that way.