Yu-kai Chou recently blogged about his negative experiences outsourcing and wisely reminds us not to lose sight of the fact that two variables go into determining the total cost of a project: hourly rate and number of hours spent, and that the number of hours spent – and therefore total cost – can be dramatically higher with a cheaper but more ineffective outsourced team.
So, how can you ensure a positive return on outsourcing? What if we reduced the scale of projects, so that even a large overrun or a disaster on any task will barely have an impact on your bottom line? What is we broke projects down to various components and outsourced those individually, ensuring continuous input from the core team along the way?
Optask is pioneering is the concept of outsourcing small tasks instead of projects. By tasks, we mean small bits of work that take anywhere from 15-30 minutes or a few hours to complete. Instead of writing a whole website, perhaps a developer could plug in to write a single function based on a spec. Instead of hiring a dedicated full-time virtual assistant, a cloud of workers could plug in on an as-needed basis to help with research tasks, compiling data and other daily annoyances that add up to eat up chunks of the day. Optask’s platform lets you do just this.
It’s not quite crowdsourcing like Mechanical Turk, and it’s certainly different from traditional proejct outsourcing sites. Of course, there are trade-offs with our approach, but we think there’s a place for our service. We invite you to Optask something today.
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