Founders: don't outsource customer development, sales and software development

Your core team should be able to pull these things of.

Sometimes I see entrepreneurs aiming to take shortcuts in outsourcing key activities of customer discovery, doing sales or building the technology. Some examples:

Outsourcing customer development

Somebody recently reached out to me asking if I provided service to help with product-market fit.

I said yes, but I found out this person was a developer basically asking for people to: target the right customer, gather leads, qualify them, do outreach, set interviews, do the interviews, process the results, and give the feedback back to him. ‘I’m the one coding’, after all.

He said it was intended as a joke, but I’ve seen this before. Founder that wants to outsource customer dev to an intern. People that want to outsource the biggest part of being an entrepreneur, such as sales.

You want to do it yourself, so you can learn from your potential customers. Every summary of a conversation doesn’t capture the richness of an interaction with a person. You want to be there, so you have rich data available, to potentially see patterns.

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Outsourcing software development

Too often, I see people outsourcing development of a tech startup to an agency. This is super expensive, and hinders flexibility. They spend €100k on an app, before doing any customer discovery.

If for each iteration on your product, you need to wait 3 months, that’s going to take too long. This is such a risky strategy. There are some agencies that know how to develop lean and MVP-style, but still, this comes at a cost.

You are not only outsourcing the building, you are outsourcing the learning during the building. That might become your key asset.

Just do it or quit

Examples of great startup that started out like that are scarce. Avoiding the trenches, just throwing some money at poorly paid people to do their job doesn’t work well in my experience.

Also, early-stage investors mostly invest in teams. So saying we are using 80% of your money on an agency is a bit rich.

You have some options:

• Bite the bullet and start doing it yourselves (most people can learn sales)

• If you really can’t learn it yourselves (such as programming), get a co-founder

• Quit your startup if you can’t assemble a team that can make the product.

Have you ever outsourced something that you should’ve kept inhouse? What was it? Let me know in the comments.

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Note: You can see I outsourced the thumbnail to ChatGPT. It’s not great.