What would you do if you have an idea, a good business sense but no technical knowledge of how to convert the idea into reality? The situation gets worse if you couldn't afford to have devs and CTO onboard. The next thing that comes to your mind would be outsourcing. Here are some lessons that you can use to make informed decisions regarding outsourcing.

1. Tech Startups and
Outsourcing
How some startups failed and some other succeeded using outsourcing

2. Failed startups and their lessons from
Outsourcing!

3. “Outsource developers typically work on various projects at the
same time and simply cannot proceed at the speed you need
them to during this stage.”
“Outsourcing your core competency and relying on a third party to
execute on the quality of your product can be a dangerous
proposition. Think of it as a restaurant that outsources it’s
cooking.” -Luis Montes

4. “Before hiring a fantastic iOS dev to our team, we relied on two
mobile development firms to build out versions of Nextt on the
iPhone. We ended up wasting time and money.”
“If you are building a software company, get your dev team in
house from day one or you will take one step forward and two
steps back.” -Mark McGuire

5. “We outsourced to a big-company 3PL way too early”
“Scale only when absolutely necessary”
-Sarah Brayar

6. “While my blood pressure grew each time I had to explain some changes in
design, functionality or screenflow.”
“I would have never thought that the Muslim holidays would actually affect
my daily business so soon.”
“Our Pakistan H.Q. was evacuated and secured for the arriving cyclone. “
“We asked for a detailed list of devices the app was thoroughly tested on,
which was ultimately replied to with “Our hardware is from stone age, but our
software is up to date.”
"Outsourcing makes only sense in case you can clearly define your project
before hand”
“Do constant code controlling by an expert.”
-Kevin Linser, Nauapp

7. “We wanted to move faster and we outsourced some parts of our
product. It was a bad decision that cost us time and money.”
“If you have to outsource, never never never outsource anything
that’s core to your business.”
-Gil Sadis

8. Successful startups and their lessons
from Outsourcing!

9. “I outsourced myself and stayed with my team (sleeping on one
of the developers couch) for more than 3 months. I came back
with a working prototype that let me fill out the rest of my founding
team here and then raise money.”
“Some other side benefits is it was much cheaper to live over
there on a daily basis than it was here. This extended the
amount of time I could bootstrap the company. It also let me
focus completely on what I was building since there was a lot less
distractions.”
-Joe Fernandez

10. "It's two kids, and [some] development was outsourced to some
Russian guys they met on the Internet”
-Wall Street Journal

11. “A few notes about working with an offshore team. If you’re gonna do it,
do it right. What I mean by that is that I’ve seen it done wrong so many
times it’s sickening. Folks in the U.S. all too often have this mistaken
belief that there are these inexpensive coders outside the U.S. who are
just on call and ready to write code based on specs. That’s a recipe for
disaster.”
“The notion here was that spending our cash is the same as spending
our equity. The more we spend early on, the less the company will be
worth in the long run.”
“As per our hunch, we learned early on that in-person time was critical
for planning. As such, we have evolved into this regular cadence
wherein for 1 week out of every month we plan together in person, and
then for 3 weeks we are more tactical as our interactions are over
skype.”
-Jason Goldberg

12. “The Squawker team is a prime example of how to work on a
development project. Their core team had between them many
decades of trading and financial technology experience, so they
were perfectly capable of steering the project while bringing in
external partners to build an integrated implementation team.”
“Startup founders often begin with a very business-oriented team
and assume that they can outsource all or almost all of the
responsibility for the technical solution.”
-Dmitry Stillermann

13. “He chose to outsource his engineering team to Israel, his Q&A to
India, and his hardware and firmware to China.”
“JPay experienced hyper growth based on their technology, but
the technology team was scattered around the world, creating a
whole new set of challenges. Ryan decided to take back his tech
team, and the rest is history. An entrepreneur needs to know
when and which parts of the company to outsource.”
-Zalmi Duchman

14. Have any outsourcing stories to share? Drop us a comment!