Tyrone Shum contacted me last week about a new outsourcing program that he’s launching soon and sent me his free outsourcing report and links to some free videos he’s done. I’ve never quite got my head around outsourcing properly before because, as a techie person, I tend to want to do everything myself.

However, as pointed out by one of my readers on the weekend’s software project update, the maintenance of my software is going to be a big and continuous job. I want to focus my time on development of new features and don’t want my time to be sucked up by doing maintenance of all the sites that the software will support. This is an ideal candidate for outsourcing.

So, Tyrone’s report is quite timely as I’m at least thinking about it now even if I’m not quite ready to implement it. His free report is called Secrets of Outsourcing Experts Revealed and it’s quite a hefty 64 page PDF and focuses mainly on interviews with Tim Ferriss, Jeff Mills and John Jonas. I don’t know who the last two guys are but I have certainly heard of Tim Ferris of the 4 Hour Work Week fame, though I’ve still not read his book :-)

One reason I’ve always thought of outsourcing as something for ‘later’ is the money issue. It seems like one of those things where you need to earn the money first before you can afford to pay for staff. I was really surprised to read about how one of the guys interviewed in the report hires a full time PHP programmer in the Philippines for just $300 a month! If I could hire a PHP programmer to do all the maintenance for me for that kind of money, that would free up a lot of time to work on new features and get them released quicker.

The first 50 pages of the report concentrate on the interviews and then the remainder has some outsourcing resources such as project management software, sites to find workers etc. I haven’t yet watched the videos that accompany the report but I’ll probably have a look at those in due course.


from Caroline Middlebrook