Outsourcing as a startup

[enjrolas]

I recently read the 4-hour work week and came away a mix of excited, entertained, and annoyed at Ferriss' douchyness. The one thing it did open my eyes to, though, was outsourcing work to India. You can get Indian outsourcing firms to do everything from making appointments to writing grants (god forbid!) to writing code, all for unthinkably cheap rates by US standards. What I'm curious about is if there's a place for this kind of outsourcing in a software startup. It seems like there must be a number of simple, repetitive tasks you could offload, from profiling your users to gathering info on similar businesses. Does anybody do this? Has anybody tried this?

[byoung2]

I run an outsourcing company with a staff of 20 in Cebu, Philippines. The team consists of web designers, programmers, content writers, and data entry clerks. Originally I hired them for my web design business, but now we mainly provide white label design/programming and data entry services for other companies.

Though jobs best suited for outsourcing are things like HTML/CSS coding, debugging, testing, data mining, data scraping, and data entry, some of the more interesting jobs we've handled for other companies include:

  whiteboard diagrams to PowerPoint presentations
  pseudocode to PHP translation
  faxed design sketch to Fireworks mockup

EDIT: Note that I did not include the name of my company in this comment or my profile lest I be labeled a spammer.

[byoung2]

Wow...immediately downvoted for a pertinent response. Sometimes I just don't get the HN community.

[quellhorst]

I would be interested in knowing how to use your services.

[floozyspeak]

You can do that Mechanical Turk. But yes, Outsourcing can do those tasks pretty easily. But outsourcing can also be plenty tricky. Its a back woods affair, its the wild wild west of development.

[ScottWhigham]

I've had mixed success with elance - it worked out well enough that I will definitely use them again.

[Kaizen]

I've also been using eLance for work on a project I've started, and expect that I will continue doing so.

My criteria to decide what work to outsource is "will having someone else do this task make a significant positive impact on the project". Generally, I've been doing the coding and outsourcing things that I don't do well (e.g., graphics and certain content). However, I'll probably hire some coders since that should let me add features significantly faster than I currently am able to do.

I'd strongly suggest starting out with outsourcing small tasks at first. Not only to protect you from paying a lot for work you may not be happy with, but also for you to decide if the results produced by someone else are so much better than what you could have done. My artistic skills are bad enough that paying an artist made sense. However, paying an editor to go through the site is probably something that I won't do again (since the gains weren't that noticeable).