In-house or outsource

I believe most tasks can be outsourced to third parties. The best examples are freelancers and agencies. But when do you what to outsource or keep it in-house?

Well, in short everything you don’t want and need to do can be outsourced. Usually, in every business, you don’t need the consistent output of a specific department.

App designers for example don’t need to constantly design new screens cause eventually, the app will have a solid foundation. Eventually, coders have built the application and thus only need patches occasionally. Eventually, growth and sales are organic and thus marketing campaigns don’t need to be set up every day.

These are all examples, where eventually the designer, coder, or marketer is not needed within the company anymore after a certain time. Then it’s better to let them go and set up a freelance/part-time contract and set up monthly-based projects. AKA outsourced.

It all depends on what you really want to have in-house. If you are a software development agency, of course, you want to have your software engineers in-house. You don’t want to be in a situation where a sudden problem needs to solve and you have to contact agencies, middlemen and sign contracts. That takes unnecessary time.

But on the contrary, you also don’t want to have engineers that you pay full-time to occasionally work the full hours a week for only 1/4 of the year. That wastes their time and your money.

What do I outsource for my indie work? I outsource logo design, (some) app design, copywriting, and field research. How do I do that? Usually using Fiverr, Upwork, or acquaintances that I luckily know.

I don’t want to do those things at all. Software engineering already takes up the majority of my time. I would be a fool to spend my time on things I’m not good at and a dumbass to expect the same quality results compared to a practitioner on the domain.

Outsource things you don’t want and need to do.