Outsource Things You Don't Care About

His post is right in that he says you outsource things that don't give you a competitive advantage. But this is not necessarily synonymous with things you don't care about.

For example, our company has an email newsletter we sell for which we evaluated multiple email service providers (ESPs) and ultimately agreed Mailchimp was best. This newsletter is a major source of revenue for us so we absolutely care about it, but we know that the value we bring is the content/data in the newsletter and not the delivery and other intricacies ESPs deal with.

Ensuring the team gets paid regularly and we're not running afoul of the IRS and NYS withholding requirements is absolutely critical, but building payroll processing capabilities internally is not something we're spending time on.

So if you don't care about it, then why build it? I think that thing you don't care about should not even be built.

I think the author talks more about things that are more like supporting features, than core features.

But let's be honest, if you are in a startup, and you are doing supporting features, then you are doing it wrong.

If you have stuff you feel is not a priority, then re-evaluate the value proposition of those items.

This doesn't mean I am against outsourcing. I am actually for it, and I think using outsourcing is great as long as you find a partner that fits in your team. In my experience outsourcing works specially when testing out ideas, before even building the team. Moving forward your outsourcing team can become your actual team.

The question is what should you care about?! The hardest part about building a software, especially a start up, is not what to put into software, but what to leave out. Pick your best thing and then stick w it (care the most about it). This may force you to neglect other aspects but make sure the things you care about are focused on and then outsource the other things you can (or put them on back burner).

Maren Kate Donovan (maren here on HN) has a startup addressing exactly this, but for individuals not just businesses. http://zirtual.com/