Ask HN: List tasks you outsource and to whom?
Lets help each other be more efficient and list any task that you outsource and how. Thanks everyone!
CD duplication and delivery: SwiftCD. Every time I release a new version of the software I send them an image of the CD, and every time I sell a CD a service I use called e-junkie (which wraps Paypal's and Google's transaction notification API on my behalf) pings them to actually ship the CD out. I get billed later in the month. Costs about $5 ~ $6 a CD, or $150 a month.
Content creation: I've talked on HN many times about how my core SEO strategy is publishing 800 (as of today) sets of bingo activities through my website. About 780 of those were written by freelancers, using (most recently) a customized CMS written in Rails. Costs about $3.33 an activity.
Wordpress themes: One of my other SEO strategies, for activities I feel are likely to have tens of thousands of searchers (mostly holiday-oriented bingo), is to create mini-sites on Wordpress which serve as very, very focused landing pages for my product. I typically try to give them a laser-focused design. Most of my existing ones are from OSS designers, one is from a designer I know in town (hiya, Keith!), and one is from the gentleman who posted on HN recently about needing to make $400 a month.
Content for mini-sites: So while I theoretically could crank out similar-sounding minisite content on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving ... I have better things to do with my very limited free time, so I pay people to do this for me. (Runs about $100 a site for 5 pages. I tend to overpay.)
Buttons: I'm passionate about A/B testing button designs and have all the image manipulation skills of a drunken squirrel. Most of the time I get people to make my images for me. I've actually got a few dozen in the pipeline right now for some A/B testing starting right after I go full-time.
General HTML design: I don't do consequential tweaks to HTML that commonly, but when I do, I typically get them done for me. As soon as my designer and I mutually have a day free we need to work on my signup pages and landing pages again.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm hoping to add taxes to the list this year, but we'll see what the pricing is on getting someone proficient with US/Japan tax issues versus just muddling through it again myself.