One of the lessons from our experience with remote freelance work is that it becomes much easier to work when:
1) The people who are working on the project (client and coder) are good and reasonable
2) When work is split up in short tasks/stories, allowing to always work on tasks of which the size can be reasonably estimated
3) The communication is well adapted to the medium, rather than a simple copy of what usually happens in an office
Although it sounds simple, in practice learning this is difficult, on both sides. We can help manually, as we are doing now, to learn ourselves what is the fastest way to get a new working relationship setup, and working.
For scaling, we think that that learning process can be made very efficient, and scale - you could probably describe our long term goal as to end up somewhere between the two models you're describing. Focusing on producing good matches that produces fruitful relationships, but maintaining enough support/advice to maintain a good level of safety.
1) The people who are working on the project (client and coder) are good and reasonable
2) When work is split up in short tasks/stories, allowing to always work on tasks of which the size can be reasonably estimated
3) The communication is well adapted to the medium, rather than a simple copy of what usually happens in an office
Although it sounds simple, in practice learning this is difficult, on both sides. We can help manually, as we are doing now, to learn ourselves what is the fastest way to get a new working relationship setup, and working.
For scaling, we think that that learning process can be made very efficient, and scale - you could probably describe our long term goal as to end up somewhere between the two models you're describing. Focusing on producing good matches that produces fruitful relationships, but maintaining enough support/advice to maintain a good level of safety.