In this insightful discussion, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing product development, especially for startups with limited resources. Discover how outsourcing can provide accountability and talent access, but also the potential cultural misalignments and long-term challenges it may introduce.

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Product Development

Wow. Right. Yeah, big, that's a big topic. Okay. So I guess let's start with the advantages, especially in the early days. I'm like, I think it's actually quite advantageous to do this because growing a team when you're very small with limited budget, it takes a lot of time. Often, maybe there may not be certain technical skills in house. You might want to attract a certain level of talent, whatever it might be. So I think being able to like outsource some of your product build to another company who has those skills, who can kind of easily ramp up a team or relatively easily ramp up a team and tackle it. And who's also, you know, that team is kind of proven, like they, like, it's not the first time they've ever built a product, right. Whereas for a founder, it might, might kind of be, you never know like what their background is. So generally speaking, they can kind of apply a proven methodology, a proven team and get to work fast and deliver. They're also accountable, right? Like, so you've suddenly got this extra bit of accountability, like one throat to choke, as they say. Like if it's not working, you're like, right, come on, you know, to do that. And whilst you're also having to do a load of other things in the early stages, such as selling to customers and things like that. So I think it kind of spreads your risk a bit, increases the accountability a bit more widely. Yeah. And like, you know, there's a lot of talent out there in the world and it might be that you're also outsourcing to a team in a country that you have no personal exposure to, right? So in our case, we actually used the team in Ukraine for about two years in the early days. And the main thing we did there is we were actually rebuilding our main platform with our own engineering team and that the Ukrainian team were building kind of like integrations and add-ons to our existing platform. So that to our customers, it felt like we were still innovating on the platform whilst our core main team w

I reflect on 10 years since David and I first publicly discussed ScreenCloud. What started as a simple prototype has grown into a platform serving over 10,000 customers with a team of 100+ people. Whilst building the product was far harder than imagined, it's been incredibly fulfilling to see our vision of screens that communicate come to life.

Celebrating a Decade of Digital Signage Innovation

So, an exciting milestone. It was exactly 10 years today that my co-founder, David, and I first publicly spoke about ScreenCloud, a prototype digital signage product that Luke, our other co-founder, and the team were building. Let's take a look. It's a cloud trying to make it better or easier to connect up multiple screens and push content to them. So, in this case, we're looking to push HTML5 content because that gives us the greatest variety of things we could then do with said screens. And really looking at a whole range of devices from phones and tablets, computer screens, to just smart, inverted commas because they're really not that smart when you get under the hood, TVs. And we think that there might be something interesting here probably for retailers, large offices with multiple screens, and even small offices as well. I mean, just really any kind of company or retailer that's trying to get messages out there and wants to maybe control them from a central point and then try and do some clever things about it. It's pretty early, but we'll probably have some kind of demo by the beginning of next week or just after Easter. So, definitely looking a little bit older and certainly a bit wiser when it comes to digital signage. Building that product was way harder than we could ever have imagined, but it's also been incredibly fulfilling. We have over 10,000 customers, a fantastic team of over 100 people. And every single day, we get up and continue to innovate the platform and try and bring that vision to life. We're focused these days more on screens that communicate. This is a huge passion. And this year, we want to educate our customers even more so they can get the most of those screens in their environment. So, excited for the next 10 years. Start thinking about what the next 10 is going to bring. With that in mind, have a nice Easter.