What I’ve Learned about Outsourcing and How It Accelerates Startup Growth

To summarize before I begin: Outsourcing software development is one of the best ways to speed up the growth of your startup.

There. I said it.

It’s a hack (hate that term) in every sense of the word. For startup business owners, a.k.a you — the guys reading this, it means being able to reach out to a professional, skilled workforce without the commitment of ‘recruiting’ them. Avoiding this costly process of hiring in-house talent reduces your overheads and contributes to accelerated growth. A lot of startups believe that you should only outsource as a last resort and that feeling usually comes from a place of holy-shit-I-can’t-finish-this-product-on-time-what-should-I-do.

I’m going to tell you why they’re wrong:

Outsourcing means access to professionals

For most founders, having everything done under the same roof represents a watershed moment where you as a company feel accomplished. At last, now team spirit can flourish over beers, foosball, and the bi-weekly Deliveroo! That sentiment is nonsense.

Just because you’ve spent two years hiring developers and finding the right office to house them, doesn’t mean you’ve found the best guys and gals for the job.

“Don’t get caught up in that feeling of needing your dev team sit 8ft away from you. It’s just not necessary.”

Nothing is stopping you from choosing to work with the best people you can afford, regardless of where they might be. Opening your mind and doing the due diligence — the same due diligence you’d do regardless when hiring in-house developers anyway — means you can begin a tech partnership with a highly skilled and professional tech studio a few time zones away. The talent’s out there; you just need to widen your search.

And don’t worry about distances, as I’ve said — supervising the team can be done from anywhere in the world. Or you can appoint a project manager. Scrum lets you keep an eye on how the project is going, allowing you to fine-tune the process and optimize as you go along, iteratively and efficiently.

Overheads? What overheads?

I don’t want to trigger any pre-funding PTSD for all you bootstrappers out there, but money is often one of the biggest issues when a startup takes its first steps, and it’s just the way things are. (It’s alright, tight budgets are character forming.) But, not having deep pockets means that optimizing costs becomes a sixth sense, even if juggling company finances is seldom fun.

Outsourcing can save up to 60% of your business’s expenses. Let that sink in. Money saved using a remote team could be directed towards areas needing improvement or optimization. Furthermore, you can allocate more money to the development and improve your product by adding more functionality, enhancing its capabilities, or creating an entirely new one. It’s not all bad.

Outsourcing lets you focus on your own shit

Outsourcing frees your mind. You, the business owner can concentrate on what you’re good at, and the remote team does the same. This doesn’t mean setting a scope and severing contact with the team until the product is completed, but it does mean you, your CTO, or a dedicated product owner strongholds the communication with the tech team, and development is iterative, you are both engaged, and the scope adapts to changing circumstances in your market. This isn’t micro-management, but it is involvement.

Additionally — and you don’t need me to tell you this — but people are better when they’re doing what they’re trained to do. Proper allocation of resources pays off. This is why I am not a firefighter or a pastry chef: it’s just not what I do best. Speaking of which, and this may come as a shock to you but:

“Business owners can’t excel at everything, and like everybody else they are the most useful when they are focused on their core competencies.”

This can be done at any stage of the development process. Kicking off development? Yes. Just launched your MVP? Yes. Adding mobile components? Yes. Polishing UX? YES. You get the idea.

Scale Up/Scale Down/Phase In/Phase Out

Some remote teams focus on the ‘zero to one phase’, which is going from an idea to an MVP with product/market fit, whereas other teams deal with the growth and acceleration stage — essentially the ‘one to a thousand phase.’ These teams know where they excel, and they stick to it.

These same teams have got their best practices down when it comes to product handovers and phasing in and out, meaning thorough documentation to hand over the code, and on-site training with an in-house team or another remote team. New stages of development require entirely different approaches, and tech studios are outstanding at adapting to that change. Your in-house team might not be. The in-house all-stars you hired to build the MVP may not be best suited to carry it forward, or may not want to, leaving you with needing to hire different developers for the next phase.

Sure, if you’re located in a densely-populated startup hub such as Silicon Valley, London or Berlin finding the right employees you are looking for locally is a bit easier — albeit expensive — but this doesn’t apply to startups founded or based in places with talent deficits. At this point, outsourcing becomes the logical thing to do, because it is.

Startups can grow because it works

Using a remote team for software development works and is often one of the smartest and most effective moves a business owner can make. What do Slack, Skype, GitHub, Opera, and MYSQL have in common? They outsourced all or part of their software development.

“Slack were bold enough to go for an externalized software development solution practically from day one, and look where they are now — a $3.8bn valuation.”

The startup world is competitive. 9 out of 10 startups will fail, and if the thought of that isn’t keeping you up at night, then I don’t what what to say. What I can say is that ignoring what outsourcing can do for your business means you’re not looking at the big picture. Don’t be shortsighted. If startup growth is your thing, then outsourcing is your thing, and you owe it to yourself and your business to explore it fully and wield it to the benefit of your business. Give it a shot.

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