What's worth outsourcing?
What kind of jobs/tasks did you outsource, especially in the early stages, that were absolutely worth not doing yourself?
Stuff like Fiverr, Upwork, VA's , etc.
What kind of jobs/tasks did you outsource, especially in the early stages, that were absolutely worth not doing yourself?
Stuff like Fiverr, Upwork, VA's , etc.
In the beginning, you almost don’t want to outsource. For one thing, you don’t have much of a budget, and even if you do, you don’t want to waste it. Also, you don’t have enough experience to hire people.
First do the tasks yourself, or at least try. This way, you can actually realize the dimensions of the job.
Then, try to automate it. Not outsourcing per se. There’s a ton of scripts out there that automate even some of the complicated jobs. Even video creation. Check them. See if they fit. If they don’t fit, then you can outsource.
Currently, a lot of businesses outsource content marketing (not just creation), PR, ORM, SEO, SMM, etc. Some are wrong choices and some are right. Depends on your business and your team.
I decide this by constantly asking myself...
"Could I pay someone to do this task at a lower rate than my personal hourly rate I would bill out at?"
For example, if I need to write a blog article and it takes me 5 hours to do an article and I value my time at $100 / hr, then the opportunity cost of me writing this article is $500.
So if I can pay someone $250 to do the whole article for me, it makes sense for me to outsource it.
This fundamental approach applies to everything, but some exceptions are:
Where doing the task yourself will provide you with key learnings about this part of the business.
If the task is super high value in the early startup phase and hard to outsource because of your own knowledge of the business, your vision, and its inner workings i.e. figuring out your value proposition, doing rough financials.
If you genuinely enjoy the task.
If it's a one-off task that likely won't come up again and might be more hassle to hire out vs just do yourself.
If you don't have any cash to invest in outsourcing or don't want to raise $.
Rule of thumb though, for any straight forward repetitive or lower value task that would cost you a lot of time to do (list building, outreach, data entry), it can be good to outsource as soon as you've got your strategy dailed in.
Spent few days on upwork looking for scraping jobs. From a freelancer point of view, there is a demand for lead generation on every stage.