Interview with Erik Hersman about Ushahidi.com

I got a chance to reconnect with Erik Hersman at SXSW & FOWA. He was on a great panel called Africa 2.0. I interviewed him about the site he helped create called Ushahidi.com to track the violence in Kenya surrounding the recent elections.


Erik Hersman – Ushahidi Interview from Chris Schultz on Vimeo.

Congratulations to Erik on all he is doing, I encourage you to visit Ushahidi.com and get involved. More about Erik can be found at WhiteAfrican and Afrigadget. As a fellow african-american, (born in Nigeria, raised in Kenya), the violence in Kenya has been very upsetting and I really appreciate all the effort that Erik (Hash) is making.

Meet the Team Behind Flatsourcing.com

Last week at SXSW, I often found myself in conversations, and being asked about our Russian development team, Flatsourcing.com. I’d like to take in this post to tell the story behind our partnership with the team at Flatsourcing.

I’ve been working with Oleg for almost 5 years now. He was the a project manager on the creation our first website, BachelorBlowOut.com, and we’ve been working together ever since. We met through eLance, the same way that many outsourcing relationships get started. And over the last five years we’ve grown to be business partners in every sense of the word. The growth of both our businesses has been directly correlated, and we’ve developed an interdependent and symbiotic business partnership.

At this time last year I took a trip to Kazan, Russia, to meet Oleg and his partners Timur and Alex for the first time. This was incredibly enlightening experience for me. in addition to the wonderful cultural exchange that took place, we were able to solidify the partnership between our companies. Since that time our business is taken off together and we’ve become a fully integrated team, albeit separated by thousands of miles.

I’ve always felt that we’ve had a very fortunate experience with our outsourcing partners, but over the years we worked very hard to build a partnership that works. I’d like to share some of the things that make our outsourcing partnership so successful:

  1. Trust - it takes time to develop the level of trust with your outsourcing partner that I’m describing above. But it’s important to take steps in that direction right from the start. This means putting systems in place to provide checks and balances for both parties for everything involved: financial transactions, deadlines, specifications, quality assurance, and communication flow. The more you put systems and best practices in place the better the level of trust you be able to establish. Our goal has always been to completely trust and empower our team in Russia, so that we don’t need to track their hours or remind them of deadlines. As we build trust on both sides of the outsourcing relationship the performance and execution has risen dramatically.
  2. Respect - Another primary factor in the evolution of our partnership has been the respect with which we treat one another. A lot of people get in outsourcing relationships looking for the lowest cost provider. I believe low expectations result from looking for low-cost, and with low expectations comes poor quality results. We set high standards for the quality of our outsourced work and we have full faith that our team is capable of doing everything we ask of them. And we are treated with the highest respect by our team in Russia, deadlines are met, communications are answered, and our expectations are always exceeded.
  3. Team - I believe getting outsourcing to work well is simple: do everything you would do if your outsourcing team was sitting in the office with you. Treat them as employees, empower them as business partners. Always treat them as if they were part of the team. That’s been the number one key to our success.

In addition to being prompted to write this post by the questions I received at SXSW, we also wanted to celebrate a shared success with our Flatsourcing team. Posted below is a Russian TV interview with the guys from Flatsourcing.com. enjoy getting our team and if you add any questions about outsourcing or Flatsourcing, give us a shout.

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