Key Takeaways

• Outsourcing can provide a quick, cost-effective way to access skilled talent.
• Cultural misalignment may occur as outsourced teams may not share the company's vision.
• Outsourcing often prioritises speed and cost, potentially leading to technical debt.

Topics

• Product Development
• Startup Growth
• Team Management
• Engineering

Transcript

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