Ask HN: Successful Outsourcing for MicroISV's

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2766890

by davidw • 15 years ago

30 16 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I really enjoyed Rob Walling's book "Start Small, Stay Small", and of course everyone here knows patio11.

I'm trying to follow their path with a project of my own, LiberWriter: http://www.liberwriter.com

So far, so good, I'm having a lot of fun with it, it's generating paying customers who are very happy to have someone to take care of a source of great frustration, and I have a lot of room for improvement on many fronts, including improving and automating the service itself, marketing it, etc... So far so good!

One thing, so far, that's been difficult to follow is the book's suggestions about outsourcing stuff. I've found a few people, and... they do get things done, but getting them to communicate is difficult, and overall I'm a bit worried that this will be the weak link in making the project scale. I'm hiring from oDesk, people from here and there, including a few in the Philippines as per the books' recommendation. I'm not 'scraping the bottom of the barrel' either; I tend to pick people who cost a bit more and have some html/ebook skills already.

I want at all costs to avoid simply creating myself a new job where I must be present to make things work - that's the point of creating a real business rather than just doing client work. I don't mind 'being the business' initially, but I won't consider the project a complete success unless I get it to run mostly on its own.

I'm looking for advice on how to best accomplish some outsourcing without spending inordinate amounts of money. In my case, the people involved will probably do both tech support and work on people's books, so they have some HTML/CSS skills.

I'm also curious about what you guys would consider normal. I'm not paying these people full time, so I know they have other priorities, but some of them seem to do things that I am not very happy with: I hit the 'hire' button for one guy, and sent him a welcome email and heard nothing back, for instance.

mahipal• 15 years ago

Well, it's definitely an iterative process. Over time, you'll converge on a "management style" that works for you and for your contractors.

Here is a good starting point, though -- Derek Sivers has a really good blog post that outlines a concrete process for hiring on oDesk: http://sivers.org/how2hire

davidw6• 15 years ago

That's a good article, and has some useful stuff.

Let me add a bit more:

I've done my best to document how things should be done, step by step, and continue working on that. I don't expect these guys to just go do various things and get it right without some detailed direction.

The parts about programming aren't as relevant to me, as I handle that side of things. More than technical skills, I need people who are going to be good at getting back to my customers in a 'reasonable' period of time and not leave a bad impression on them. That, and people with some basic HTML/CSS skills to work on customers' books. That much, people do have... I guess I'm looking to figure out what's normal in terms of communication skills and turnaround time, and ... how other people deal with the huge gap between themselves, who are quite dedicated, get stuff done quickly, and have every incentive to get things just right, and 'hired guns'. There's going to be some of that gap in a normal startup where you hire people to work alongside you, but it's even bigger if you're outsourcing, and can't provide incentives like stock options, and don't even see the people in question.

In other words: as long as it's just me answering tech support requests, I'm generally very quick to turn them around, provide quick, helpful answers, and seem to be getting very positive reactions from people. I'm scared of things taking a turn for the worse when other people start answering support requests.

igor_a• 15 years ago

Regarding breaking the communication barrier - if you hired someone from another side of the Earth and he is doing really a great job and you are fully satisfied with quality and price - visit him or her, air tickets are quite cheap and this will be great experience both for you and for your employee

davidw6• 15 years ago

I just started LW this year, so I'm off to the left of "this" graph: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month

That's not really a feasible suggestion at this point in time.

My concern is that I won't make it further right without first finding the right people.

davidw6• 15 years ago

One suggestion I received is to simply look for people in the US, and pay them a bit more, which could work out too. Anyone gone that route, and how did you do it? People willing to work for lower wages in the US are not exactly lining up to respond to oDesk announcements, it would seem. Craigslist? Anyone else gone that route?

richardw2• 15 years ago

Here's a timeous post via Bob Walsh: http://47hats.com/2011/07/outsourcing-101-for-startup-founde...

It does a good job of breaking out approaches for different skills, considering timezones etc.

One idea: "Hire one or two people from Philippines for $3/h to help you hire someone. Ask them to post your job on the different websites I cited above and to filter the good from the bad based on the criteria you give them.

I found my own Ruby on Rails developer this way and we have been working together two months and I can't be happier. It costed me $20 to get two people look for a developer for me."

davidw6• 15 years ago

That's a pretty good article, and has some of what "Start Small, Stay Small" says. I guess what's tripping me up is that for something like customer support, you want to put on a really good face, not have some guy answering with poor English 36 hours later. I'm starting to wonder how that might work economically. I began trying to find people right away, figuring (correctly) that I'd want to start working on this part of the business from the get-go, because for me it's one of the most difficult parts to figure out. So far, I'm not terribly impressed, and am wondering if I just have expectations that are too high, or what.

richardw2• 15 years ago

I know what you mean. I tried outsourcing some support when my app first went live. I couldn't do it because the requests I was getting just needed me to support it, partly because many questions were (and still are) often things I need to think about to answer well.

I guess the solution there is to, over time: dumb down the support required, transfer the remaining knowledge required to the support person (policy and feature documents), accept that some things just have to be answered be us.

Shout if you find a solution to that :)

cincinnatus• 15 years ago

Since you are not looking for a developer you can expand how you look at this.

Do you live near any universities? I would suggest what you need is a grad student that has a few extra hours a week. Small commitment on both your parts, low enough cost, and easier communications for you and your clients.

You may also be able to find a stay at home parent.

In both these cases the person may not be looking for your opportunity. You will need to be creative. Go to campus and find out how to get in touch with students. Look for local parent groups. Think outside the box.

tnorthcutt2• 15 years ago

I think this is an excellent suggestion. There are probably lots of moms who are very capable of communicating in an intelligent manner and would like to work ~10-15 hours a week from home, but don't know where to find legitimate work like that (as opposed to "WORK FROM HOME AND MAKE $$$$$!!!!!").

patio112• 15 years ago

The short answer? You find one reliable person who you like working with, then you delegate increasing portions of the work to them.

For example, I had a pretty good working relationship with my ex-freelancer for BCC bingo card content, but let's pretend that I was serious about never spending my time on that again. What I would do is a) grab all the docs I had written about the process, b) spit them into a Google doc document with headings like How To Find A New Freelancer, How To Make a CMS Account For A Freelancer, How To Pay Freelancers, Content Guidelines, etc and c) hand that off to the young lady in the Philippines who does utility VA stuff for me. Then, I'd have her hire a new freelancer and do one week of work with them, with instructions to email me at each step for review. I'd give feedback and update the docs where required. After she was capable of doing it without needing my supervision, I'd tell her "Great, it's yours now. Make it work and send me an email once every two weeks with what you did, what you're doing next, and anything you need from me. You have my email any time if there is a problem that you need an answer to. If resolving the problem would cost less than $100, pay money to solve it and just tack it onto the next regularly scheduled email. I trust your judgement."

n.b. That $100 idea is flagrantly stolen from Tim Ferris.

As for normal: if I work with three people, I expect one or two to be Too Flakey To Use Successfully. That's just a cost of doing business. This suggests a) getting out of the talent identification business, since either I suck or it is impossible to do well and b) hanging on to good people for dear life. I sent my BCC freelancer a Christmas bonus every year and thank you notes, and got ~3 years of mutually rewarding work out of her.

Regarding customer support: I do customer support myself. All of my CEO friends are trying to get me to stop, principally because they are all tired of hearing "Ooh ooh ooh guess what a customer just asked me about how I broke her blue Googles?"

If I were emotionally ready to stop, the first step would be writing a Google doc with instructions and four buckets of customer support inquiries, which represent ~80% of the emails I write. Each bucket would have a template email to go with it.

The instructions would be "Bucket the email and, if it is clearly in a bucket, reply with the template and $INSTRUCTION_FOR_MAIL_FILING. If not, leave for me to deal with by $INSTRUCTION_FOR_MAIL_FILING. If you're less than 90% sure, leave it for me."

Then we'd iterate on that. If they could handle bucketing, I'd move them up one step: here's my core principles for CS. I always want to make them happy, a refund is always an option, we never do custom dev under any circumstances. Here's four emails from customers which were not bucketed last month. Write responses to them like you think I would have written responses, then send those responses to me.

Then I'd say "OK, I like the content here, but I always start emails out with thanking the customer for emailing me. This email here said 'If you hadn't clicked' -- that phrasing is not acceptable, because it implies customer fault, and the customer is never at fault for a failure of our software to anticipate their needs. Otherwise, OK." Then I'd start them on live emails and review their progress. After that: "Congrats, you're now level 1 support. $INSTRUCTIONS_TO_FORWARD if you're totally bewildered by an email. Good luck."

As you go forward, document your processes. I cannot stress this enough. That way, when your current support gets married, stops responding to emails, or informs you that she has taken a job at a multinational and will no longer be freelancing, you can quickly get the new person up to speed. (Or, even better, your trusted lieutenant can quickly get the new person up to speed.)

davidw6• 15 years ago

Wow, thank you very much for the excellent response. It makes me feel better on two levels, first that a lot of the ideas of how to make it work are similar to what I had in mind and have started to document, although you've gone into much more detail.

Second, I find it very interesting that you're still handling support, and something of a relief - it means I've got a lot of runway before I have to think seriously of giving that up. I'll keep working on it with the idea that if I start now, hopefully I'll be more or less prepared when I really do need to pass it on.

patio112• 15 years ago

A major portion of the reason why I can still handle support is that I made significant tech & process investments to minimize it. I only have to write a handful (5 ~ 7) emails a week for BCC most weeks. (And if I was more aggressive about templated responses -- like ironically I used to be -- that would be 2 emails a week.)

I get the feeling that some part of your business is a semi-manual process. Semi-manual processes aren't wrong, per se, but there are many more opportunities for things to go wrong manually than there are for them to go wrong with automated systems. As you find where the pain points are, automate where required.

For example, you might find yourself getting a lot of emails asking "What is the status of my order?" That's a great opportunity to make a) an automatically updated Order Status Page, heavily promoted in your "Thanks for your money" email and interface and b) an automated "Jane Smith's order is taking longer than we would like" email (which does not have to go to you -- you can put systems and processes for failure recovery in the event of first freelancer flakeout) and c) an automated "Jane Smith's order is now really freaking late and the CEO owes her an apology" email, which should probably go to you.

swanson• 15 years ago

There is a portion of Episode 136 of TechZing [1] that addresses some of these issues as Justin (one of the hosts) is also trying to follow Rob's outsourcing advice for his SaaS product. Rob Walling himself also left some advice in the comments.

[1] http://techzinglive.com/page/772/136-tz-discussion-celebrige...

Ask HN: Successful Outsourcing for MicroISV's

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