There is a lot of mundane shit in a start-up. How do you find alpha users that fit your target audience? If you have a start-up like Triggit, you search through Google, and Technorati, and blog directories, and any source for users. Then you have to find all their contact information, which is another pain in the ass. Here we sit, with all these really innovative ideas for development, and marketing, and design and we need to spend hours upon hours searching blog directories for users.

So what does a bright, ambitious, probably a little egotistical (we are after all entrepreneurs) company do to solve this problem? Obviously we find cheaper talent to do the shit work. We would not actually want to hire someone in the US, because that would require tax documents, or employment forms, or really just a lot more cash then our stingy and frugal lil start-up can deploy. We’ve got to keep the burn low! So we turn to Asia, and Outsourcing.

When I first started looking for outsourced talent, I was a true believer in the commoditization of a particular skill sets. I read all of the articles I could get my hands on about the subject, and they all endorsed the view that simple tasks could be simply outsourced. I scoured the various outsourcing sites: Rentacoder.com, getafreelancer, elance, odesk, freelancenow. I was thrilled! Look at all of this cheap talent! $3/hr, sweet!

Marcos lived in Corodoba, Argentina spoke great English, and only cost $6 and hr! We were stoked, he seemed to be able to code okay, so we set him up to do feed integration for us, a tedious task that is also profoundly precise. For a while we rationalized that his average work was worth the cheap price, but then users started to complain that the matching wasn’t great, clients begun to wonder what was taking us so long to get them into the system, and Marcos kept vanishing every couple of weeks to take vacations with his new fiancé. Marcos sure was cheap, but his price reflected his work.

We have since gone through a series of outsourcers for various projects. From lead generation to simple CSS alterations and basic pages. And the results have been uniformly the same. The talent is cheap, but the results are marginal at best, and reliability is non-existent. My favorite was when one of our better guys, Prem, wrote us an email saying “Sorry, Couldn’t work on your Project for the Past 2/3 days due to complete Power shutdown during Day time & also problems with Internet Connection.” Needless to say about half our projects fall flat on their face.

I no longer fear for the job security of quality engineers in the developed world anytime soon. The need for quality and reliability is a massively hard problem even when you have the talent sitting at the desk next to you. Outsourcers have little incentive to produce anything more then the minimum requirements as typically even the best individuals and firms are balancing multiple projects at once. Loyalty is almost impossible as each fights for better ‘feedback scores’ so they can obtain more, better paying work. But if you set your expectations low, and realize a lot of your projects might fail, outsourcing has the potential to be a great, if frustrating experience.