This is an anonymous guest post from a good friend of mine who recently outsourced a very large web project to a team of developers in India. Throughout the entire project I was deeply fascinated by the concept. He was kind enough to take time out of his busy day to write a post about his experience. For the last year I've been working on developing a large-scale web project, not one of the caliber of Amazon, Twitter, Facebook or eBay but with good planning and a bit of luck, it could conceivably attract some of those web stars to acquire our site in the future. I have known Adam for several years and we have become friends and a good source of advice and guidance in each other's business decisions and experiences. Please understand that it is very difficult to summarize an 11 month project like this in a single blog post, but I will do my best to hit the key points while sacrificing some key data. The key data I won't include is who I am, what my site is, who I used for outsourcing, and who my business partner is. I'm doing it this way for a few reasons, but mainly to keep things simple for this post and we have some potential partnerships we're working on and will be making significant changes to our site if they go through, so we don't want to push it or create additional buzz at the moment. Also, I will be painfully honest at times and don't want to insult or hurt anyone's feelings. It seems obvious, even silly, to mention it, but the first thing you need is a feasible project to outsource, in my case it was programming for a fairly complicated website. Protect yourself, but remember that NDAs and ACs are only as good as the people who sign them, if someone is about to breach the contract you're on the hook... half the paper... a characteristic of those who don't? they do not speak English as their first language. The most frustrating thing was that, until we realized it, they simply skipped or ignored our detailed explanations, often if there was an important detail in the second sentence it was often left out. Overall I enjoyed the experience and learned more than I could have imagined. I have had regrets at times and if I could go back I would do things differently, but I would still outsource and probably go with the same company. We saved a small fortune, which made the difference between creating this site or not. We've all heard stories of outsourcing, although it's rare to meet someone who has actually done it. I hope my short profile has helped dispel some misconceptions and share some of the lessons learned when outsourcing so you can decide if it's the right path to pursue in the future..