[syllogism]

Seems solid to me.

At the start the founders will fill the requests, and slowly onboard staff. While the founders are filling the requests they're possibly running at a "loss" from opportunity cost, but I can easily see them being willing to do that.

Wrapping odesk or MTurk is the last thing they'd want to do. It kills the edge they have, of zero project management overhead.

[giaour]

Or maybe their edge is that they talk to the customer and then subcontract the task out on oDesk or MTurk?

Zero project overhead is a more plausible justification for their pricing than zero project management overhead.