Outsourcing Challenges for Early Stage Startups

According to International Business Machines (IBM), ‘IBM Global Services: A Brief History,’ outsourcing was first recognized as a business strategy in 1989 and became an integral part of business economics throughout the 1990s. Originally, they only focused on what they could do well, and some companies were split from their parent companies to support other sister companies collectively. However, as new industries emerged and the market became saturated with outsourcing companies, they needed to explore new domains rather than solely relying on wellknown business models in which they excelled, later this led to the outsourcing companies needing to outsource their business to other smaller companies and freelancers. Eventually, the outcomes from these companies will worsen and worsen. 😔

We expect that outsourcing companies would act like an expert but in the current market situations they can’t provide real expertise any more, this may cause fatal damage in your startup journey. In early-stage startups, we almost always claim that we are unique and something different, innovative, disruptive. If that is true, you are the only one who can fully understand what you are doing. Additionally, growth-oriented strategies boost these worse directions, founders in the startups ignore everything(?) but focus only to build their first MVP even though they don’t have any engineers inside. If you have no CTO or engineers in your company and decide to hire an outsourcing company.

Here is what would have happened.

Operational Hurdles Await: Your boat will go mountain.🏔️ I highly doubt that founders will talk with outsourcing engineers on a daily basis and share what you would do. In most cases, you will talk with someone who leads the team once a week or once a month only. And you will only scold them if the progress is being delayed.

Demo vs. Reality: 🎉 Your product is truly MVP for your demo. Your product will not run this as an operational stage smoothly which means only designed for your demo and not the end users. Most engineers in the outsourcing companies are good at standardized tasks, not your company product. If real users come you will know

Delayed Development Looms: 🕰️ Your product development will be delayed. In most cases, they never worked together before because the companies just hire them from freelancer markets or other companies and we can’t expect that they act like a team and they will wait for a clear guide directly from you. Oh yeah, we are too busy? And they will just wait as they will get money anyway. 💸💤

UI/UX Challenges: Your UI/UX looks easy to use. In fact, it looks quite similar somehow from somewhere. Maybe only the color theme would be different. You can easily find the same designs soon. As they need to finish a strict timeline, they will do the best way (AKA dirty yet easy) to finish the task and will leave the project as soon as possible. 🎨

#startups #MVP #engineering