

Ask HN: List tasks you outsource and to whom?  - twidlit

Lets help each other be more efficient and list any task that you outsource and how. Thanks everyone!
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patio11
Hmm, I should probably do this as a blog post. Oh well.

CD duplication and delivery: SwiftCD. Every time I release a new version of
the software I send them an image of the CD, and every time I sell a CD a
service I use called e-junkie (which wraps Paypal's and Google's transaction
notification API on my behalf) pings them to actually ship the CD out. I get
billed later in the month. Costs about $5 ~ $6 a CD, or $150 a month.

Content creation: I've talked on HN many times about how my core SEO strategy
is publishing 800 (as of today) sets of bingo activities through my website.
About 780 of those were written by freelancers, using (most recently) a
customized CMS written in Rails. Costs about $3.33 an activity.

Wordpress themes: One of my other SEO strategies, for activities I feel are
likely to have tens of thousands of searchers (mostly holiday-oriented bingo),
is to create mini-sites on Wordpress which serve as very, very focused landing
pages for my product. I typically try to give them a laser-focused design.
Most of my existing ones are from OSS designers, one is from a designer I know
in town (hiya, Keith!), and one is from the gentleman who posted on HN
recently about needing to make $400 a month.

Content for mini-sites: So while I theoretically could crank out similar-
sounding minisite content on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving ... I have better
things to do with my very limited free time, so I pay people to do this for
me. (Runs about $100 a site for 5 pages. I tend to overpay.)

Buttons: I'm passionate about A/B testing button designs and have all the
image manipulation skills of a drunken squirrel. Most of the time I get people
to make my images for me. I've actually got a few dozen in the pipeline right
now for some A/B testing starting right after I go full-time.

General HTML design: I don't do consequential tweaks to HTML that commonly,
but when I do, I typically get them done for me. As soon as my designer and I
mutually have a day free we need to work on my signup pages and landing pages
again.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm hoping to add taxes to
the list this year, but we'll see what the pricing is on getting someone
proficient with US/Japan tax issues versus just muddling through it again
myself.

~~~
twidlit
wow, awesome specimen of how to outsource/delegate.

