外包决策框架：只外包不提升核心价值的非差异化工作

Hey, good morning Micro. My name is Kevin Graham and today I'm here to share with you the framework of outsourcing everything that doesn't make your beer taste better. Yeah, if you listen to the acquired podcast, Ben and David from that talk about this concept frequently, it comes from a talk that Jeff Bezos gave at Y Combinators startup school in 2008. Over the next 15 minutes, I'll explain the concept, share some examples from my own business and then the framework that you can use when deciding whether something should be outsourced.

But first, a bit about me and my background. Uh, as Lyanna already said, I'm the founder of Side Arrow. It's a proudly bootstrapped company. I started it in December 2015 with Bulkby Hosting. Uh we have six figure MR in the highly competitive web hosting industry doing a lot of things like comparison pages and we run all of this with three part-time contractors plus myself because we use outsourcing extensively. But first I want to start this presentation by telling you more about this photo here.

This is an old electric power generator at a 300-year-old brewery in Luxembourg. And yes, that's Jeff Bzos there in the photo. About a hundred years ago, this brewery were one of the first businesses in Luxembourg to use electric power. A lot of companies around that time were discovering that they could improve their processes with electricity. There was no power grid at that time, though. So, if you wanted electricity, you need to generate your own.

As you can imagine, generating electricity is difficult, technical work, and it's also capital intensive to buy and install all of that equipment. So you might be wondering at this stage, what does power generation and beer have to do with software businesses? Well, there's a lot of undifferiated work in running a SAS business. Hiring, managing payroll, collecting payments, blog content, pay-per-click ads, server in infrastructure, the list goes on.

Now, it's essential to focus on the attributes your customers actually care about, which is the taste of the beer for the breweries that will be visiting this afternoon. And for your SAS, it's the value that your product delivers to your customers. Whether that's the speed and reliability of an email forwarding service or the time savings they get from your scheduling tool. Being a bootstrapped or mostly bootstrapped founder requires efficiency and making the most of the limited resources you have in both time and cash.

Whether that's because it's a side hustle you're still working nights and weekends to do this and your time and money are limited or if you're funded and you have 24 months of runway before you either need to be profitable or raise your next round. Outsourcing gives you access to savings that come from economies of scale through uh services from shared service providers or fractional access to more uh specialized labor whether you've got like a fractional CFO or fractional marketer.

Now I want to share the story of my journey to outsourcing support within our business. As I mentioned we started in December 2015 with Bolt by hosting. After about a year in the business with me doing support tickets every day, seven days a week, I hired my first part-time customer support contractor. And then six months later, I added a second. We're doing support during daytime hours only, though, which meant it could take up to 18 hours for a customer to get a reply.

In 2018, we started acquiring some other web hosting brands. And with that really came the need for a true 24/7 support infrastructure. We tried for about eight months with a patched together team of three part-time contractors across the three different time zones. Uh you know working a few hours a day follow the sun sort of model slightly reduced support coverage over the weekend. Doing that we had a time to first response of like 2 to three hours which is great but still not really exactly where I wanted to be.

And if any of those support contractors went on leave then I had to cover that shift. As you can imagine managing all that's pretty stressful. And in addition, while the support team were good at handling the customer side issues, I was still responsible for all the server infrastructure, which meant my phone was on 24/7. If a server went down, I had to wake up to fix it. This is one of the challenges that all of us face operating smaller companies, which is what led me to find an outsourced uh web hosting support agency in India.

They provide us with proper 247 coverage for just a,000 bucks a month. In terms of how I found and selected that agency, I did the exact process that Dev spoke about before. I went on Google, outsourced web hosting support, contacted a few of them, went through their process and uh just decided which one I liked and went with. My fear around outsourcing the support though was that they could face a loss of quality uh in the responses to our customer tickets and also for the SEO hosting brands of bulk by hosting and launch CDN.

I believed from the start that we need to hire and train our own support team because I thought it was a very unique service and like just couldn't be outsourced which I was proven wrong. So to alleviate the fear of uh the loss of quality, I started small and expanded later. This is what Jeff Bezos would call a two-way door which essentially means it's a reversible decision. If the customer support uh agency didn't work out, we transition back to our in-house team who are still supporting bulk by hosting and launch CDN and we could test another provider.

So, we started them with the retail web hosting brands that we'd acquired as a smaller part of the business overall and very similar to the other clients they working with, which meant like it gave them the most chance for success. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, I guess, the outsource team were great at answering these tickets. We quickly built up uh confidence in their ability to do this and then after about six months we started testing them with bulk by hosting and launch CDN tickets as well.

The end result of all this the support we now offer our customers is a lot better. Time to first response is 15 minutes or less. Most tickets are resolved in less than an hour and that's like much faster when we were doing it inhouse with our janky little team. Um, as the business grew, we upgraded to a dedicated team of six people with that agency in June 2021. By doing that, they're now taking care of all the server administration, whether that's server updates and also if a server goes down.

So, if a server goes down right now when I'm on stage, they'll get a notification, they'll fix the server, get it back online. Key benefit of all of this is uh I don't need to worry so much anymore. like there's an agency there that are handling the rostering and scheduling for the agents. If one of them is sick or goes on leave, then they have a backup agent that um comes in to cover the tickets. And as well, I don't need to be on call 24/7.

If a server goes offline, they're going to bring it back on. We still do quality control on all the tickets, though. So, one of the three team members that I have reviews all of the closed tickets to make sure they meet our quality standards. And then all I need to do at this stage if I'm not building new stuff in the business is just check in on the business for 15 to 30 minutes every morning to make sure everything's running smoothly.

This then gives me a lot more time to work on the business rather than in the business. So doing things like looking at um new businesses to acquire, building new web hosting brands from scratch or reading and learning and improving my skills. All of this freedom leaves leads to things like this which is uh giving me the ability to travel more. So uh two three weeks ago I was at the cloud flex uh conference in Germany and right now I'm here at micro in uh Denver but I swear it's not all busin