This will be my 2nd start-up company, after leaving buy-side industry for three years. It may be a bit too premature to disclose what it gonna be this time for now, but what I really wanna share (and is more important for those of you who are looking for similar exit paths from the finance industry) is my painful experience in technical execution. In our first start-up, we began with a team of four – two finance professionals, one marketing expert, and a tech geek. To make it more professional and as part of learning process, we approached some local Hong Kong web design and development houses to help us with the web design and development parts. Why not overseas vendors? Time zone and legal jurisdiction are big hurdles. Believe it or not, you’ll experience later when you try setting up phone calls with them, not to mention thereafter monitoring processes. Hong Kong is not short of web design and development companies. If you “google” it, search results of over 20-30 pages. But we were frustrated with: 1) Prices – say for an informative website, these production houses can charge from HK$8,000 (or even lower) to HK$200,000 (and up). How much should we pay? What makes the price difference? 2) Templates – are they using standardised templates, or customised layouts? We want customised and be ‘different’, don’t give us standardised templates please! We ended up signing contract with a development house, HK$12,000 all-in, including web design and development, with customised layout. It was so attractive enough and we signed the contract with that vendor. Too Good to be True Later we found out it was all too good to be true. 1) Design – disastrous (need not to explain further). 2) Delivery – 3 months was what mutually agreed. But ended up 3 months + 3 months + 3 months = 9 months. Kept missing timeline, we wondered they prioritized team resources to other projects who paid them better. 3) Add-ons – codes. Our plan was to move all technical stuff back to our in-house technical team afterwards. We had never expected vendor charged us an additional HK$50,000 for the codes at the end of the project! Some Are Good Though….. We ended up scrapping all web design and development work by that vendor, and looked for another one. We came across some decent web design companies (they were not charging as low as HK$12,000 for an informative website. “Cheap for a reason” is so true, trust me): 1) Oursky – A big team with over 20 developers. Young, professional, and responsive. They charge about HK$4,000-4,500 per man day (one of the highest locally), or you should expect some HK$60,000-80,000 for an informative website (including design and development), may not be that affordable by every start-ups. Coding quality is good. 2) Zinglev – Known for its innovative and quality design. Professional and responsive. Their informative web site (including design & development) starts from HK$30,000-35,000 & up. Despite a smaller team of just 5-6 people, we were surprised by their high efficiency and quality deliverables. My last words. Don’t bother too much if vendors are using some commonly-used development tools (or what we called “templates”) when building your website. The nowadays development tools can customise the web layout in many different ways, and these tools are time-tested which save you a lot of time from debugging. What matters is the web design (viewers can close the crappy-looking websites’ browsers in a short period of time, and that explains why we scrapped HK$12,000).
