

Ask HN: Successful Outsourcing for MicroISV's - davidw

I really enjoyed Rob Walling's book "Start Small, Stay Small", and of course everyone here knows patio11.<p>I'm trying to follow their path with a project of my own, LiberWriter: http://www.liberwriter.com<p>So far, so good, I'm having a lot of fun with it, it's generating paying customers who are very happy to have someone to take care of a source of great frustration, and I have a lot of room for improvement on many fronts, including improving and automating the service itself, marketing it, etc...  So far so good!<p>One thing, so far, that's been difficult to follow is the book's suggestions about outsourcing stuff.  I've found a few people, and... they do get things done, but getting them to communicate is difficult, and overall I'm a bit worried that this will be the weak link in making the project scale.  I'm hiring from oDesk, people from here and there, including a few in the Philippines as per the books' recommendation.  I'm not 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' either; I tend to pick people who cost a bit more and have some html/ebook skills already.<p>I want at all costs to avoid simply creating myself a new job where I must be present to make things work - that's the point of creating a real business rather than just doing client work.  I don't mind 'being the business' initially, but I won't consider the project a complete success unless I get it to run mostly on its own.<p>I'm looking for advice on how to best accomplish some outsourcing without spending inordinate amounts of money.  In my case, the people involved will probably do both tech support and work on people's books, so they have some HTML/CSS skills.<p>I'm also curious about what you guys would consider normal.  I'm not paying these people full time, so I know they have other priorities, but some of them seem to do things that I am not very happy with: I hit the 'hire' button for one guy, and sent him a welcome email and heard nothing back, for instance.
======
patio11
The short answer? You find one reliable person who you like working with, then
you delegate increasing portions of the work to them.

For example, I had a pretty good working relationship with my ex-freelancer
for BCC bingo card content, but let's pretend that I was serious about never
spending my time on that again. What I would do is a) grab all the docs I had
written about the process, b) spit them into a Google doc document with
headings like How To Find A New Freelancer, How To Make a CMS Account For A
Freelancer, How To Pay Freelancers, Content Guidelines, etc and c) hand that
off to the young lady in the Philippines who does utility VA stuff for me.
Then, I'd have her hire a new freelancer and do one week of work with them,
with instructions to email me at each step for review. I'd give feedback and
update the docs where required. After she was capable of doing it without
needing my supervision, I'd tell her "Great, it's yours now. Make it work and
send me an email once every two weeks with what you did, what you're doing
next, and anything you need from me. You have my email any time if there is a
problem that you need an answer to. If resolving the problem would cost less
than $100, pay money to solve it and just tack it onto the next regularly
scheduled email. I trust your judgement."

n.b. That $100 idea is flagrantly stolen from Tim Ferris.

As for normal: if I work with three people, I expect one or two to be Too
Flakey To Use Successfully. That's just a cost of doing business. This
suggests a) getting out of the talent identification business, since either I
suck or it is impossible to do well and b) hanging on to good people for dear
life. I sent my BCC freelancer a Christmas bonus every year and thank you
notes, and got ~3 years of mutually rewarding work out of her.

Regarding customer support: I do customer support myself. _All_ of my CEO
friends are trying to get me to stop, principally because they are all tired
of hearing "Ooh ooh ooh guess what a customer just asked me about how I broke
her blue Googles?"

If I were emotionally ready to stop, the first step would be writing a Google
doc with instructions and four buckets of customer support inquiries, which
represent ~80% of the emails I write. Each bucket would have a template email
to go with it.

The instructions would be "Bucket the email and, if it is clearly in a bucket,
reply with the template and $INSTRUCTION_FOR_MAIL_FILING. If not, leave for me
to deal with by $INSTRUCTION_FOR_MAIL_FILING. If you're less than 90% sure,
leave it for me."

Then we'd iterate on that. If they could handle bucketing, I'd move them up
one step: here's my core principles for CS. I always want to make them happy,
a refund is always an option, we never do custom dev under any circumstances.
Here's four emails from customers which were not bucketed last month. Write
responses to them like you think I would have written responses, then send
those responses to me.

Then I'd say "OK, I like the content here, but I always start emails out with
thanking the customer for emailing me. This email here said 'If you hadn't
clicked' -- that phrasing is not acceptable, because it implies customer
fault, and the customer is never at fault for a failure of our software to
anticipate their needs. Otherwise, OK." Then I'd start them on live emails and
review their progress. After that: "Congrats, you're now level 1 support.
$INSTRUCTIONS_TO_FORWARD if you're totally bewildered by an email. Good luck."

As you go forward, _document your processes_. I cannot stress this enough.
That way, when your current support gets married, stops responding to emails,
or informs you that she has taken a job at a multinational and will no longer
be freelancing, you can quickly get the new person up to speed. (Or, even
better, your trusted lieutenant can quickly get the new person up to speed.)

~~~
davidw
Wow, thank you very much for the excellent response. It makes me feel better
on two levels, first that a lot of the ideas of how to make it work are
similar to what I had in mind and have started to document, although you've
gone into much more detail.

Second, I find it very interesting that you're still handling support, and
something of a relief - it means I've got a lot of runway before I have to
think seriously of giving that up. I'll keep working on it with the idea that
if I start now, hopefully I'll be more or less prepared when I really do need
to pass it on.

~~~
patio11
A _major_ portion of the reason why I can still handle support is that I made
significant tech & process investments to minimize it. I only have to write a
handful (5 ~ 7) emails a week for BCC most weeks. (And if I was more
aggressive about templated responses -- like ironically I used to be -- that
would be 2 emails a week.)

I get the feeling that some part of your business is a semi-manual process.
Semi-manual processes aren't wrong, per se, but there are many more
opportunities for things to go wrong manually than there are for them to go
wrong with automated systems. As you find where the pain points are, automate
where required.

For example, you might find yourself getting a lot of emails asking "What is
the status of my order?" That's a great opportunity to make a) an
automatically updated Order Status Page, heavily promoted in your "Thanks for
your money" email and interface and b) an automated "Jane Smith's order is
taking longer than we would like" email (which _does not have to go to you_
\-- you can put systems and processes for failure recovery in the event of
first freelancer flakeout) and c) an automated "Jane Smith's order is now
really freaking late and the CEO owes her an apology" email, which should
probably go to you.

~~~
davidw
> I get the feeling that some part of your business is a semi-manual process.
> Semi-manual processes aren't wrong, per se, but there are many more
> opportunities for things to go wrong manually than there are for them to go
> wrong with automated systems. As you find where the pain points are,
> automate where required.

There are some manual bits to it, yes - I don't think it's something that will
ever scale up _hugely_ , but I think I can charge more for it, and automate it
more and more, so I'm fairly happy.

I am documenting everything as much as I can, and then looking over it later
and adding more detail, but the thing that spurred this posting was simply
that all the documentation in the world won't help if you've got people who
don't reply in some sort of defined time-frame. I'm not expecting immediate,
but within some sort of bounds. Not having much experience with this, I just
don't really know if that's all you're going to get with someone a long ways
away who doesn't earn a ton of money. If there are people out there who are
pretty dependable, I suppose that means I need to be a bit more brutal in
trying people out and then discarding them, which isn't much fun.

~~~
tnorthcutt
>I suppose that means I need to be a bit more brutal in trying people out and
then discarding them, which isn't much fun.

Remember, you don't owe a freelancer anything except what you've promised
them. Pay them fairly (and quickly) for the work they've done, but don't
continue to give them more work if you're not happy with them.

------
richardw
Here's a timeous post via Bob Walsh:
[http://47hats.com/2011/07/outsourcing-101-for-startup-
founde...](http://47hats.com/2011/07/outsourcing-101-for-startup-founders/)

It does a good job of breaking out approaches for different skills,
considering timezones etc.

One idea: "Hire one or two people from Philippines for $3/h to help you hire
someone. Ask them to post your job on the different websites I cited above and
to filter the good from the bad based on the criteria you give them.

I found my own Ruby on Rails developer this way and we have been working
together two months and I can't be happier. It costed me $20 to get two people
look for a developer for me."

~~~
davidw
That's a pretty good article, and has some of what "Start Small, Stay Small"
says. I guess what's tripping me up is that for something like customer
support, you want to put on a really good face, not have some guy answering
with poor English 36 hours later. I'm starting to wonder how that might work
economically. I began trying to find people right away, figuring (correctly)
that I'd want to start working on this part of the business from the get-go,
because for me it's one of the most difficult parts to figure out. So far, I'm
not terribly impressed, and am wondering if I just have expectations that are
too high, or what.

~~~
richardw
I know what you mean. I tried outsourcing some support when my app first went
live. I couldn't do it because the requests I was getting just needed me to
support it, partly because many questions were (and still are) often things I
need to think about to answer well.

I guess the solution there is to, over time: dumb down the support required,
transfer the remaining knowledge required to the support person (policy and
feature documents), accept that some things just have to be answered be us.

Shout if you find a solution to that :)

------
cincinnatus
Since you are not looking for a developer you can expand how you look at this.

Do you live near any universities? I would suggest what you need is a grad
student that has a few extra hours a week. Small commitment on both your
parts, low enough cost, and easier communications for you and your clients.

You may also be able to find a stay at home parent.

In both these cases the person may not be looking for your opportunity. You
will need to be creative. Go to campus and find out how to get in touch with
students. Look for local parent groups. Think outside the box.

~~~
tnorthcutt
I think this is an excellent suggestion. There are probably lots of moms who
are very capable of communicating in an intelligent manner and would like to
work ~10-15 hours a week from home, but don't know where to find legitimate
work like that (as opposed to "WORK FROM HOME AND MAKE $$$$$!!!!!").

------
swanson
There is a portion of Episode 136 of TechZing [1] that addresses some of these
issues as Justin (one of the hosts) is also trying to follow Rob's outsourcing
advice for his SaaS product. Rob Walling himself also left some advice in the
comments.

[1] [http://techzinglive.com/page/772/136-tz-discussion-
celebrige...](http://techzinglive.com/page/772/136-tz-discussion-celebrigeek)

------
mahipal
Well, it's definitely an iterative process. Over time, you'll converge on a
"management style" that works for you and for your contractors.

Here is a good starting point, though -- Derek Sivers has a really good blog
post that outlines a concrete process for hiring on oDesk:
<http://sivers.org/how2hire>

~~~
davidw
That's a good article, and has some useful stuff.

Let me add a bit more:

I've done my best to document how things should be done, step by step, and
continue working on that. I don't expect these guys to just go do various
things and get it right without some detailed direction.

The parts about programming aren't as relevant to me, as I handle that side of
things. More than technical skills, I need people who are going to be good at
getting back to my customers in a 'reasonable' period of time and not leave a
bad impression on them. That, and people with some basic HTML/CSS skills to
work on customers' books. That much, people do have... I guess I'm looking to
figure out what's normal in terms of communication skills and turnaround time,
and ... how other people deal with the huge gap between themselves, who are
quite dedicated, get stuff done quickly, and have every incentive to get
things just right, and 'hired guns'. There's going to be some of that gap in a
normal startup where you hire people to work alongside you, but it's even
bigger if you're outsourcing, and can't provide incentives like stock options,
and don't even see the people in question.

In other words: as long as it's just me answering tech support requests, I'm
generally very quick to turn them around, provide quick, helpful answers, and
seem to be getting very positive reactions from people. I'm scared of things
taking a turn for the worse when other people start answering support
requests.

------
davidw
One suggestion I received is to simply look for people in the US, and pay them
a bit more, which could work out too. Anyone gone that route, and how did you
do it? People willing to work for lower wages in the US are not exactly lining
up to respond to oDesk announcements, it would seem. Craigslist? Anyone else
gone that route?

------
igor_a
Regarding breaking the communication barrier - if you hired someone from
another side of the Earth and he is doing really a great job and you are fully
satisfied with quality and price - visit him or her, air tickets are quite
cheap and this will be great experience both for you and for your employee

~~~
davidw
I just started LW this year, so I'm off to the left of "this" graph:
<http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month>

That's not really a feasible suggestion at this point in time.

My concern is that I won't make it further right without first finding the
right people.

