What do you outsource, how, how much?
I was wondering how do other indie hackers decide what and when to outsource. I know, for example, that I suck at design. Purchasing templates and hiring designers are a no-brainer for me. I normally start with a template and eventually include a designer to do a revamp in case something is picking up speed.
There are some other areas in which I do not suck, but time is limited. I have some projects in the back of my mind and I am always thinking whether I should just hire someone to develop them. But I always struggle and knowing how much should I expect to pay and in exchange for what. Agencies charge way too much for my pocket, and freelancers are very hard to source. Quality and price changes too much.
How often do you outsource? What is your overall experience?
Tax preparation, as I don't know how to do it properly, and fines for screwing it up can jeopardize the future of the company.
I'd probably outsource bookkeeping sometime in the future.
Where do you pay taxes?
I live in The Netherlands, for 1-person businesses, taxes are straightforward to fill and predictable (provided you are somewhat organized in noting expenses, etc.)
For proper companies (i.e. several shareholders, etc.) there are some caveats that are worth the money for a proper accountant.
My business is registered in the state of Delaware, United States.
As I'm a foreigner and own more than 25% of the company, I have to fill Form 5472 (in addition to Form 1120, which is a whole different can of worms). The inaccurate report or failure to file the said form carries a $25,000 fine.
Considering that, it makes sense to outsource tax preparation for a few hundred bucks.
I pay for someone to handle my taxes, too. I use QuickBooks Online Self-employed to organize all my income and expenses. I have a business account and QBO SE automatically places all transactions in the right bucket. At first you have to train QB, but it picks up common recurring transactions overtime, to the point where I only have to assign one-off transactions to the right category. It's convenient to see income and transaction reports and is worth the $10/mo.
I'm runnig a agency and we're outsourcing most of our new projects now. Mostly Design & Web Dev. There's a lot of talented freelancers around that are looking for work. Our experience this far is mainly positive.
If you have projects you think that has potential I can only recommend to outsource it and let a freelancer make you the first MVP. You can always prepare a document with everything you need for the MVP and give it to the developer for a first quote. Then ask 2-3 other devs for a quote. You can then get a feel for whats maybe overprices etc
Having good freelancers in the team is great but I agree that finding them is hard. I would say it's the hardest part. We mainly trust on work our freelancers have delivered in the past. For Designers we like to screen Behance Profiles and for Dev we like to screen their GitHub Profiles. When onboarding start with a small "dummy project" with a fixed deadline and look if they can deliver the promised work. You can also see how they work with fixed deadline and check the communication.
What worked for us is "hire fast, fire fast". If we think the freelancer is a good fit we hire them quickly. If they don't perform they're out again as fast as we hired. This speeds up the process of finding the good freelancers
I totally agree with this attitude. I've been a dev freelancer myself in the past 7 years. When I have new projects coming in and not enough time on my hands, I hire freelancers, give them a dummy project to test the waters before letting them work on important stuff.
If they're not up to my standards, I let them go and find another. I usually hire two freelancers in parallel in order to choose on of the two.
That's the way to go.
I was in the situation of having too much on my plate, but when I tried to oursource, I couldn't find anyone that was up to my standards. It would have required too much coaching so in the end it was not worth it. But I am in a complicated niche.
As in my other comment, how you define the dummy project? Do you use it for screening, do you pay the freelancers for it?
an example for a dummy project. Let's say I'm searching for a UX Designer for an App Idea. I'll give them one screen to design and pay a fixed price I negotiate with the designer beforehand (like 50$). When I like what they do the designer gets to design the next screens
Gotcha. It's like a hiring fee somehow. Have you worked with many freelancers? What is the failure rate? (i.e. do you have a lot of freelancers that didn't deliver what you were expecting?)
6 years in business and since 3 years we're outsourcing to freelancers. So we have worked with out fair share I'd say :)
It depends. When we for example scout for talents on like behance (for designers) or github (for developers) they actualy deliver the quality that is on their profiles.
When it comes to seaching on upwork (for example) it seems like some people faked their portfolios. Because what they deliver and what they post on their portfolios is like miles apart
So what do we do:
We pay upfront for people we scouted on github & behance. So when we make the first step and write to the freelancers
On upwork you can get away with posting a dummy project as requirement on your jobpost and only pay for the winner (like a small competition). At least that's what we do. You don't have to pay for the dummy here if you don't want to as the competition is like enourmous
Super, thanks!
Once you have a pool of freelancers you worked with in the past, I assume a lot of things become a breeze. I'm slowly building that network mostly through referrals.
Behance and Github are very good to see designers/developers portfolios, but do you actually use them to find them or just to vouch them?
And indeed, "hire fast, fire fast" is a good approach. When you say dummy project, how do you establish the threshold? Do you use it as a real selection process or do you pay for it with the promise of 'more to come later'?
I tend to outsource content creation. I'm not a native English speaker and so I think the way I write is too conversational. It also takes me a lot of hours if the topic doesn't interest me.
I'm currently also outsourcing design and trying out a VA for more administrative tasks, such as data research and entry, repetitive work, emailing, etc.
Good content creation can be quite expensive (if it includes research, etc.). How do you find people to write? And to design?
Would love to hear more about your experience with a VA. What kind of tasks are you sending their way? What do you mean by data research and entry?
It definitely can! However, I'm getting 2-4k-word articles for $70-$120, which I think is quite cheap. I find freelancers through Upwork or through Failory (my site) connections. I take care of all the research and structure of the posts, which reduces the time the freelancer has to spend on it.
As for design, I'm lately hiring unlimited design services. I'm currently trying one that's called Draftss.
Regarding VAs, I'm yet experimenting with it. I'm using a tool called FreeUp (which I think it was recently acquired by The HOTH) to find them. The first VA that contacted me sounded really professional and provided a fair quote, so I've been working with her on different tasks and she is doing a great job.
I want to eventually be able to outsource to her the whole process of getting interviews for Failory, uploading content to the site, etc. However, I'm starting with simpler tasks so that I can be sure she can deliver high-quality work. With data research I mean, for example, providing her with a list of companies and she needs to find some information on Google about these.
The article on unlimited design services was very helpful, thanks! I am not there yet as to make that level of monthly comitment. Hope you do a write up about VA and how they have helped you! I am still struggling to identify what tasks could I offload to them, some of the things are more sales and lead identification/generation than what I assume a VA could handle.
I’ve always outsourced my book keeping to local freelancer who knows what they are doing. I’m awesome at a few things, that is definitely not one of them!
Identifying one owns weak spots is an incredibly useful skill. Sadly it may take too long to realize what it is that we don't like and is drawing the energy from us, or what it is that we just suck at.
I do need a local bookkeeper, but they are too expensive, so for the time being I am managing myself, but I know it will be the first thing I want to get rid of as soon as I have a bit more of cash flow stability.