

Never outsource your core - bwertz
http://versiononeventures.com/never-ever-outsource-your-core/

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user24
Depends what's meant by "core".

If you're a cake business, don't outsource cake making, but do get someone
else to build your shop.

But so many web companies spend time and energy building CMS, db astraction
layers, and tonnes and tonnes of infrastructure that is _nothing to do with
their business_.

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rwanghacker
The most common problem I see is technical outsourcing, there are a lot of MBA
based teams who cannot convince a great technical person to join.

As a result, outsourcing to get the product done becomes a necessity and also
easier than going around to find a good technical cofounder. It is also
tempting since outsourcing seems cheaper and promises to get the product
built.

The product just ends up not being good enough.

As a technical person in the startup industry, this is the #1 reason why I
think startups fails.

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russell
A few years ago I did some pro bono work(not intentionally :-) for a couple of
startups with domain experience but no software development experience. They
had offshored their work to groups in India. The delivered products were
marginally functional and not satisfactory. The had compounded the domain to
developer communications problems with remote and cultural issues.

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jsdalton
I tend to agree with this advice, but OXO (maker of well-designed houseware
products) is a famous counter-example. Not only do they outsource
manufacturing (as nearly every product company does these days), but they also
outsource _product design_ , which is absolutely their core competency.

I've never understood how they made that work, but obviously it is a strategy
that has worked well for them.

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mmagin
Marketing. A lot of their recent stuff is cheap crap, IMHO.

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rhizome
Absolutely. They are coasting on a couple of awards they received 10 years
ago.

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mitchdumke
We ran into this dilemma last year at Lucidchart when we were debating how to
handle SEO, PR, and general marketing. We flirted with outsourcing but
eventually hired two full-timers and we haven't looked back. Took a month or
two to get them up to speed on the product and best practices but I now glean
off of their expertise and having them in-house makes our team stronger.

The only thing we would outsource is very quantifiable deliverables that need
no additional maintenance to be valuable. Ie. data entry, template designs,
link building.

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nborwankar
I stopped reading at "outsource ... analytics". In this age of data and data
science "analytics" means a lot more than web analytics and some javascript on
your web pages. This expertise needs to be part of your organization's DNA.

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bwertz
I think analytics was referring more to the tools to capture analytics data,
not the process of making sense of that data (which is definitely core!)

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alexchamberlain
Not sure marketing is core to most startups...

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bwertz
I would argue it needs to - marketing starts with thinking about how to
communicate your product value to your customers and ends with strategies to
keep them happy and around for as long as possible. A great product is the
basis but if you don't spend time thinking about how to market your product,
your company will most likely not scale

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jonaldomo
heads up - broken link on the inc.com article

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bwertz
Thanks - removed the link.

