Scaling: It's so hard! Am I missing something?
As things get busier and you have more cash, how do indiehackers spend that cash to offload work?
I've been struggling with this!
You can stop reading now and answer, or continue to see what I've struggled with, what I've succeeded with below.
Details:
What's difficult:---->
1. Knowing what to outsource:
- Dilemma: The tasks I need the most help with are the hardest to outsource tasks- like intermittent errors.
- Do I outsource a whole feature to a full stack dev/designer? Or do I split tasks up to backend/frontend devs
2. Finding good quality people
3. Knowing how to go about the outsourcing process
- What does this look like? What access do you give people? What instructions do you give people? It would be awesome to see what this looks like but I don't ever see tutorials on this process.
What I've done:---->
1. Tried to outsource on fiver: Went Bad
The programmer insisted that React wouldn't scale and wanted to redo my whole app in Django. I've experienced this a few times now; the programmer recommends redoing your whole project to a stack they like.
2. Tried to outsource on CodeMentor: Went bad
I posted a question related to an error I was getting. Got low quality responses. First person waisted my time. They basically did what I already did- googled the problem when I was on zoom with them. Then they confidently told me the solution was some answer I had previously seen on SO, which it wasn't. I felt this was very careless, and more what a friend might do if you asked for help; not what someone you're paying should do.
I had another codementor tell me they needed access to my heroku and mongo Atlas logins. They were probably right, but I got nervous giving a stranger this information.
Paraphrased Tips from @BoringSaaSGuy (on twitter):
- Add in your post "Mention key word ------ in your message so I know you read this post" to filter low quality responses
- Outsource smaller tasks to build trust before outsourcing large issues where you need to give away credentials.
3. Hired an email consultant: Went great
I hired @harriskenny to help me set up my email domain properly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). I found Harris because he posted on Twitter about solving email domain issues. When I ran into email problems I remembered him and contacted him.
He talked me through what I needed to do which I liked more than having him do it all. This way I'd learn a bit about what was involved.
Why this went well:
- The tasks was defined- it wasn't a mysterious error.
- I picked someone who did it before and my peers recommended him
- I could understand his accent. It's not fair to people, and I hate that I have a hard time understanding certain countries accents... but I do! So I liked that I could understand his accent because he's from the US.
- The topic wasn't something I needed to know too much about in the future
On a fun note or on a serious note - There should be a productized serivce to handle these kinds of adhoc tasks.
But just some real advice:
A service that help your hand through the outsourcing process would be awesome!
Yeah, that's what I meant - productized serivce to handle these kinds of adhoc tasks.
You should split feature into multiple subtasks including frontend and backend tasks and than outsource tasks depending on the developer expertise available to you. It gives you flexibility also helps you pick and choose developers with varied expertise and derisks your overall feature. As a general rule when creating a task you try to split them into as many independent tasks as possible and worry about "who" later.
Look for known currency.
a. Find someone in your own network
b. Find someone in social platform like IH . So many developers advertised their services who have abandoned their projects so you can look at their history see what they have built and than check their availability. You have far more information than you will ever get in codementor/fiverr etc.
c. Find developers providing productized service lot of people have advertised it on IH.
You can cancel anytime and you can assign any number of ad-hoc tasks so no haggling over task/cost and these are individual developers.
Knowing how to go about the outsourcing process
outsourcing process is very different depending on the business. Even though you are making good money you are too tiny for most outsourcing firm. For small companies with upto 10 people you can't get mired into rfp/estimation/quote/negotiation/legals/delivery etc. Your time is precious take the path of minimum effort create tasks that you want to accomplish put them on github issues assign to whomever you are outsourcing to and review the pull requests. Access should just be your github if your secret sauce is not code also developer should be able to complete the task with just the github repository i.e. if you are asking for stripe integration than github repo would not suffice you will have to provide something that developer can test in his local environment so test stripe token apart from github.
I think is better to have a full-stack developer for each module/functionality of the system, because It is always difficult to trace an error between different people in different tiers of the architecture.
That relies on you.
If you are using Git, I think that the developer have to get to acces to the corresponding branch of the modules they owns.
Thanks!
Ahh yea I’m not so nervous about my repo, it was open source until 2 weeks ago. But more nervous about giving credentials for access to my mongo cloud, or heroku, stripe credentials etc.