

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?
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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.

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byoung2
Wow...immediately downvoted for a pertinent response. Sometimes I just don't
get the HN community.

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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.

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

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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).

