Outsourcing, the way to success
We noticed our clients are often afraid to access to outsourcing services due to unfortunate past experiences and a significant lack of trust towards potential outsourcing partners.
The truth is a significant tech shortage is affecting the European Union market and most of the time qualified local IT partners are busy, too busy to be able to afford a brand new project, no matter how exciting it is. Another issue is that the abundance of demand of A-level IT solutions turned the local market as very expansive and unaffordable, especially for small scale-ups with limited resources.
Discussing with our partners enabled us to hear about a couple of “horror stories” involving unreliable IT partners and catastrophic or inexistent end-product at delivery time.
However, outsourcing does not only match with failing. There are actually out there way more successful startups and scale-ups than you think who successfully worked with outsourcing partners to create outstanding tech products.
AppSumo
With an average of 700,000 of subscribers AppSumo, created in 2010, is one of the companies with the most subscribers on the web. As of today the company is valued at 2 USD Millions and is well-known for outsourcing in different fields from IT to Marketing and Content. One of the significant outsourcing projects of AppSumo was to entrust an external IT supplier to build their PayPal pay button.
Skype
Founded in 2003, the famous web messaging and calling platform, was, from its very early days, partly built thanks to the collaboration of external outsourcing IT suppliers.
From its very early days, Skype founders did not only work with in-house team members to develop the platform.
With millions of connected users across the globe, the platform mostly built with the help of outsourcing partners was acquired by Microsoft for 8.5USD billions, proving that outsourcing can create value if you do it right.
GitHub
With millions of users and projects posted, GitHub is one of the best-known tools and community engagement platform called for help outsourcing partners to build the platform as it is today. Started as a side project in 2008, the company called for help, for financial reasons, external IT supplier to help them building the backend of the platform and standing at the edge of innovation. With over 600 employees today, GitHub is the living proof of wonders high-quality outsourcing can do.
You know your company is a success when it becomes a verb. Well, that’s kind of what happened with WhatsApp and trust me Jan Koum himself, today listed by Forbes as one of the richest American, did not expect such a success.
Launched in 2011, WhatsApp did not expect to encounter such a quick success, and with nearly nothing as funding seed, the message app hired offshore developers based in Eastern Europe and Russia to build most of the app that Facebook acquired a few years later for USD 19 billion.
BaseCamp
The most people’s favourite project management tool would unlikely to be as it is without its founding tie hiring remote developers to build significant parts of its features. While growing, the company started facing organisational issues that were impacting the quality of the work they’d deliver to their clients. To solve this issues in a timely and cost-effective manner, Jason Fried (CEO of Basecamp) and the rest of the team decided to outsource the development of their products to remote, external developers. Present in over 32 countries across the globe, Basecamp is a fantastic illustration that outsourcing is essential in tech innovation.
Slack
Slack’s team always prove themselves as being remarkably opened to outsourcing, as the company outsourced different aspects of the business from Marketing to Content, Design and IT. The real deal for Slack was to outsource the building of their app to a Canadian based agency, who contributed to establishing the brands differently. Following this release, Slack landed a $250 million investment, proving all the great things a brilliant outsourcing partner can do for your business!
Are you looking for outsourcing partners able to unlock the full potential of your project? Join GROW Labs and access to the best development solutions worldwide.