Founders need to outsource
Get the right shit done, not the shit you enjoy
One common reason people give for outsourcing is to lower costs. However, the reason that startup founders need to outsource is so that they can focus on what needs doing rather than actually doing it.
Founders are constantly optimizing, and its easy to fall into the trap of filtering out tasks that need doing by what is possible based on your current team. For example, when considering whether to automate a process or do it manually, you might choose to automate it because you have a team of talented developers, none of whom like doing manual work.
Outsourcing frees you from this limitation. It unlocks (for me at least) a mental barrier. With outsourcing your team’s potential skill set is unlimited. It allows you to stop filtering/prioritizing tasks based on what you can do today, and instead prioritize them on how important they are and find the people you need to get them done.
When doing a startup there is a lot of work that needs to be done. As a technical cofounder I often fell into the trap of prioritizing work I enjoyed, or work we were well equipped to do. In hindsight this was a terrible idea, instead I should have prioritize whats important, and found ways to get it done.
Our business’s main distribution channel is organic search. For several years we lacked a good way to decide what new websites to launch or content to publish. We would make decisions based on a few keyword volumes pulled from the adwords keyword tool. We really should have been checking thousands of keywords, to give us a fuller picture of how much demand there was and where the demand was specifically.
Because the work was rather mundane, it didn’t get done. Armed with outsourcing however, years later, we delegated hours of mundane work to our virtual staff, allowing us to crunch through tens of thousands of keywords giving us a detailed picture of the demand.
The result? A clear map of what websites we should launch and which content to publish, based on work that I didn’t want to do nor did I want to ask one of my engineers to do.
Figure out what needs doing, and outsource the stuff your team doesn't have the skills or interest in doing. Get back to being an entrepreneur, someone who allocates resources and capital, instead of being a cog in your own machine.
