Never outsource your core

Depends what's meant by "core".<p>If you're a cake business, don't outsource cake making, but do get someone else to build your shop.<p>But so many web companies spend time and energy building CMS, db astraction layers, and tonnes and tonnes of infrastructure that is <i>nothing to do with their business</i>.

The most common problem I see is technical outsourcing, there are a lot of MBA based teams who cannot convince a great technical person to join.<p>As a result, outsourcing to get the product done becomes a necessity and also easier than going around to find a good technical cofounder. It is also tempting since outsourcing seems cheaper and promises to get the product built.<p>The product just ends up not being good enough.<p>As a technical person in the startup industry, this is the #1 reason why I think startups fails.

I tend to agree with this advice, but OXO (maker of well-designed houseware products) is a famous counter-example. Not only do they outsource manufacturing (as nearly every product company does these days), but they also outsource <i>product design</i>, which is absolutely their core competency.<p>I've never understood how they made that work, but obviously it is a strategy that has worked well for them.

We ran into this dilemma last year at Lucidchart when we were debating how to handle SEO, PR, and general marketing. We flirted with outsourcing but eventually hired two full-timers and we haven't looked back. Took a month or two to get them up to speed on the product and best practices but I now glean off of their expertise and having them in-house makes our team stronger.<p>The only thing we would outsource is very quantifiable deliverables that need no additional maintenance to be valuable. Ie. data entry, template designs, link building.

I stopped reading at "outsource ... analytics". In this age of data and data science "analytics" means a lot more than web analytics and some javascript on your web pages. This expertise needs to be part of your organization's DNA.

Not sure marketing is core to most startups...

heads up - broken link on the inc.com article