Tech startups, let’s bust some outsourcing myths

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

In this series's intro and second article, we covered the benefits of partnerships and outsourcing for startups.

Despite the advantages, startups have many concerns about partnerships/outsourcing.

The major concerns areas are,

• IP protection
• Quality
• Control
• Communication
• Management overheads
• Timezone Differences
• Culture etc

Many of these concerns come from the traditional view of partnership as low-cost, low-quality, opaque outsourced work from a far-off timezone. The skills and knowledge gap is a major concern too.

However, things have changed quite a bit from the past

• skills and knowledge are spread out throughout the world
• agencies organize workforce with advanced skillsets, often across multiple geographies around the world
• agencies work in collaborative and transparent ways
• many agencies have a partnership(long term) mindset over project mindset(short term)
• the evolution of technology and practices (eg: micro-services, cloud, automation) allows a new way of organizing small, self-contained, and autonomous teams.
• remote work is maturing fast. Tools and processes are constantly evolving.

With such advancements, most concerns today are perceived more than real!

IP is a somewhat different concern, though.

In my view, most code isn’t IP that matters.

From a Jeff Bezos quote,

Focus on what makes your beer taste better

For example, web apps are a commodity. The major differentiator is how you solve a particular problem for a particular market. Save your founder energy for that space. Let experts take care of the tech. Rent in the expertise before you have locked into a market fit.

There are good software agencies that address all of the above concerns. With that, the biggest challenge for a startup remains partner selection.

It’s a crowded space and finding the right partner is a difficult step. I will cover that topic in a future blog in this series.

I help connect startups to matching software agencies and with partner selection. You can reach out to me for a deeper discussion.

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