There are easier ways of doing startups in the developing world too: in most SE Asian cities you'd have 24 hour power and not be able to tell what continent you're on inside the spacious office you're renting for the price of a desk in SF. I can't help thinking the only real barrier to entry other than culture shock (not a big problem if you're somewhere like the Philippines) is terrible business regulations enforced by ridiculously corrupt officials. And some startups probably go under that radar anyway...
If you're bootstrapping with no need to network for sales, further investment or elite development skills, and don't mind adapting lifestyle a little bit, the developing world might be a good idea. If you're doing fairly time-insensitive contract work that can be done remotely or just fancy a break, it's a great idea.
(I spent most of the last 20 months in various developing countries. I'm not convinced going back to London is such a great idea yet...)
It's cool to see someone doing a startup in Nepal. I went to high school there and lived there for two years. It's where I first started programming and getting into online business. I hope the internet situation has improved. We used to have a 64kbps radio connection, and that was FAST for the country at the time.
To get any sort of work done you need to give good instructions to good workers, all within a good process. If any of these aren't in place it is hard to get quality results.
(Disclaimer: I am the founder of CloudFactory, a next generation mTurk working to get the right mix of solutions, process and workers.)
Panos has been using mTurk for years and knows how to break work down and give clear instructions to workers (plus validate to catch spammers and lazy workers). Most people need to fail a bunch of times in learning how to create tasks well before becoming good "factor owners" as Panos described it. We have a team of crowd solution developers that design workflows, create killer task forms, analyze data and improve everything so others don't have to go through the painful ramp up.
We have sent many thousands of tasks through mTurk while we build up our own workforce from scratch. Anonymous workers that sign up online in 2 minutes with fake info have no accountability or ownership in their work. This is just never going to work. You end up with anarchy in the marketplace, both workers and requesters get ripped off. CloudFactory is taking a totally different approach to building up our workforce to ensure that workers have accountability, are matched to the right tasks and in general are motivated and enjoy their work. Happy workers are good workers and we don't see any technology making up for this.
That said, a process is required and this is where technology is important. Quality control techniques are essential to catch mistakes even when the best workers are given clear instructions. We take a factory, mass production approach to this type of work and our platform offers tools to give real-time control and transparency to your work done in the cloud.
So when the screwdriver (mturk) isn't working properly, don't get a hammer (odesk) ... just get a better screwdriver!
How to move to a third-world country and plant a tech startup http://blog.cloudfactory.com/2012/10/how-move-to-third-world...