Several years ago, when Serge Knystautas was building his Web site business, PrestoSports, he faced a typical start-up dilemma: He badly needed software developers, and he was finding it hard to lure such in-demand workers when he couldn’t promise them a steady paycheck.
So Knystautas turned to oDesk, an online platform for hiring, managing and paying remote freelance workers of all kinds. From his Rockville, Md., headquarters, he scooped up developers based in Russia, China, Colombia and elsewhere to help PrestoSports build its system for hosting Web sites for hundreds of college teams.
“Telecommuting on steroids,” Knystautas calls it.
PrestoSports has grown since those early days, now working with some 700 colleges, but oDesk remains an important part of its business model. More than a dozen technologists in Latin America today work for PrestoSports via oDesk, collaborating among themselves and with workers in the Washington area.
Knystautas never meets oDesk workers before contracting with them, but the site has ways of reassuring him that he’ll get his money’s worth. It asks freelancers to pass tests to verify that they’re qualified for specific jobs. It shows reviews of their work for previous oDesk clients. And once freelancers are on the clock for Knystautas, an oDesk tool offers him screenshots and minute-by-minute logs of their progress, making it easy to ensure that they are on task.