What do you outsource as an indie hacker?
I've seen this topic come up a number of times recently. I feel there is a perception that outsourcing is quick and easy, but it's not always been that way for me. Sometimes it has worked great, other times it bombs out completely.
Maybe we can help others get outsourcing right:
- What do you outsource?
- Where do you find a person or service to help?
- What advice can you give to make outsourcing work well?
- What are some things you definitely wouldn't do?
Don't have much time to give an answer right now, but there's one warning/piece of advice I'd love to give on this topic:
If it's an activity you:
a) learn about your customers from
b) haven't done so often that you could write an exact playbook on how to do it
c) think could damage your business seriously if the person you outsource to suddenly fell under a bus
... then you shouldn't outsource it yet, if ever.
I'd agree. So many founders have asked me for recommendations of someone they can hire to do their customer learning for them. And it's like... well, you can't outsource that.
A good cautionary tale about this is from Sivers' Anything You Want (great book). He didn't like finance stuff, so he outsourced it all, and ended up basically having his company stolen out from under him. In his words: "delegate, don't abdicate."
The playbook for doing it right seems to be E-Myth Revisited by Gerber. It's written for small business owners (using a cafe as an extended case study), but I've found it hugely valuable and use it as my bible for any task I'm planning to hand off to anyone else (employee/freelancer/PA/whatever).
Thanks for the recommendations!
Sounds like a great read and a problem-solving book...
Hah, yes, very much so. I've recommended it probably 100 times and have bought at least 10 copies to give to people. It's less relevant for pure tech startups, but for anyone who relies on people and processes, it's a godsend.
I don't have any income yet so don't outsource anything yet. It's definitely top of mind so I'm using PomoDoneApp to track where I'm spending time to, hopefully, make good decisions about early hires and outsourcing.
One of my co-founders is reviewing my help content and my sister (copy writer) is providing a third set of eyes.
I don't think I'd ever outsource any of the C-suite positions just because outsourcing+decisions seems like a bad idea.
I outsource script coding, explainer videos development, and research items. Usually use Fiverr or Upwork. I’m looking to outsource social media efforts next.
I struggle a lot with outsourcing development work. I've tried that once for a startup and had a terrible experience. I've done that multiple times as a manager at previous jobs and the results were abominable. I discourage people from outsourcing development work. It's a recipe for disaster. I'm not saying that it will never work, but the success rate is low (especially around quality).
Instead, try to rely on integrating with SaaS products as much as possible. I agree with the comment made by @louisswiss. It's really good advice.
I've seen people have more success with outsourcing design work. However, there are so many alternatives with the rising #nocode movement.
I'm looking to hear other people's thoughts on what worked well for them as the outsourcing model can be highly economical.
Development. There's a lot to "indie hack" with products besides the actual hacking. I'm not a full developer but have other skills needed so it works for me. I put off starting several projects forever because I felt like I couldn't build a "real" product if I wasn't doing it all myself, but I think that was a false requirement. It's commonly called being a "non-technical founder", but I find that funny. People outsource copywriting and aren't called a "non-copywriter founder". I think it's fine to outsource what you need to.
As far as advice, I find you just need to be organized, communicate a ton and be clear about what you need and set timeframe expectations. Treat them like you would anyone else on your team and you'll find it can be the same.
I've found people through my network as well as developers I've worked with at my old agencies. I've even hired from Fiverr for a super tiny job I was too lazy to reach out to people about. It was a fairly basic PHP need that was too far outside of my wheelhouse. It ended up working out great.
I'm just getting started on this journey but I intend to outsource the stuff that I know how to do, but is A. very time consuming and B. I'm not the best at.
I'm good at developing software and that's where I think my time is providing the most value for my product. Things like designing and making screenshots for the App Store and making a landing page are two things I can do and do pretty well, but it'd be much more efficient for me to pay someone to do that at this stage.
I've outsourced design, front end work, backend development work, and internationalization. Backend work was absolutely the hardest to do correctly, and I have 6+ years of experience in the technology I outsourced work for.
My biggest piece of advice is to make sure you communicate as much as you can with regards to expectations, progress updates, and deadlines. Especially if you are hiring someone who's working part time on multiple projects, they are likely not super organized and will forget to update you, or put off your work, or worse. I'd recommend emailing/messaging at least three times a week until the project is delivered.