Real Business - The Champion of UK Enterprise

Consider Bulgaria for developers

By Catherine Woods, published 2 years ago in Sales & Marketing.

Wigadoo helps people organise social events where there’s money involved. Rajah explains: “It can be total hassle when you’re organising a bunch of friends to go to the theatre or on a holiday – someone has to play the role of organiser and sometimes they have a very hard time sorting the money side out. Often they have to pay for everything upfront and then what happens if people pull out?”

Wigadoo was formed in January 2007 and the site was launched at the end of June 2008. Today, Wigadoo has a team of five people based in the UK and four offshore developers in Bulgaria.

Rajah says Wigadoo identified Bulgaria as a top place for website development after extensive due diligence. “We needed cost effective but good developers because we’re not just a soft and fluffy website; we have a hardcore payments platform behind it so we were specific about the type of expertise we needed to find,” she says.

“We looked in lots of different places – China, India, various places in Eastern Europe, the UK. The guys in Bulgaria referenced very well and we’ve had a really good experience working with them.”

The Wigadoo founders came across the Bulgarian team through their network of contacts, which included other successful internet entrepreneurs.

Rajah adds: “It’s very common to have an offshore development team because having it onshore is so much more expensive. When you’re a startup, you don’t have a lot of money to spend and you become very cost conscious.”

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