This thread over at realestatewebmasters.com shows the pitfalls of taking ethical shortcuts and contracting work to a company without having performed due diligence.
It seems, Mr. Park learned a valuable lesson when he paid an offshore company $10.5k to create for him a clone of a popular real estate site called Redfin.com.
>>"My name is Ron Park and I have been working with a service provider...to create my real estate mash-up site. My project...was for a Redfin.com clone, in all functionalities and appearance. They were supposed to finish the site by January 25th, 2008 but yesterday, 4/24/08, I told them I'm through with them. The site is nowhere near being a Redfin clone, and they've just been problematic from the start. I have given this company a total of $10,500..." <<
When his plagiarized version didn't materialize as expected, he proceeded to ask for help through a public discussion forum of web developers; he was trying to beef up his claim to recoup his "investment" from his credit card company. (If successful, who would've ultimately paid for that mishap, I wonder?) Not surprisingly, not too many sympathizers there. (Another lesson learned.)
At the end of the day, I have to hand it Mr. Park. He does seem to have learned his lesson and finally seems to have written off the $10k+ outlay as a sunk cost... and probably a relatively inexpensive lesson to boot if he doesn't get sued by Redfin.
When asked this question by another forum member,
>>"Curious as to what that lesson learned was... that you "get what you pay for" or that "cloning" a site "in all functionalities and appearance" is horribly unethical and likely quite illegal?"<<
Mr. Park replied,
>>"The latter along with the former. To tell you only the latter, would be a lie. And to tell you only the former, would be a lie too. I learned that copying a site is wrong, and that I wouldn't want my name and business to be associated with trouble and copycat-ism. And I also learned that outsourcing, like Tim Ferriss made it sound, isn't as easy as pie. That's what I learned..."<<
At the end of the day, that's a good outcome.
Just one additional note before I let this one go. During the course of the discussion thread, I felt an unfortunate thematic byproduct that outsourcing work to offshore companies results in the kind of outcome described above. I personally don't think that should be one of the takeaways from this lesson.
For my part, I think some of the lessons that should be gleaned from Mr. Park's unfortunate business expansion strategy is not that he chose an offshore company, but rather that he contracted with a company -- whether onshore or offshore -- that: a) Was untested; b) Was all too willing to accept a gig without specifically defining business and technical requirements of the project, as well as documenting measurable success criteria, and c) Seemed all too willing to be complicit in an unethical business practice.
