Success stories of outsourcing
When a company lacks resources, skills, or budgets, outsourcing becomes a beneficial method of getting things done while maintaining high-quality standards. Many companies starting from small startups to technical dragons employed outsourcing and have delegated specific tasks to experts. Having known the intrinsic keys of Outsourcing, let us now look at some success stories of outsourcing.
Slack sacked $900 million!
Slack, developed by Slack Technologies, is a business communication application for sending messages, files, and tools. Slack is known for its minimalist and non-intrusive design. The success of Slack solely depends on its user interface design and its ability to understand the user needs. It is flabbergasting to note that these two keys to success were made possible by employing an outsourcing company. Yes, Slack’s entire look and feel are outsourced to a Canadian design Team, Metalab. Metalab designed Slack’s logo, marketing website, web app, and mobile app. Although the estimated budget for the development is about $5 billion, the developers toned it down to 250 million by outsourcing to Metalab. Metalab developed the beta version of Slack from the ground up. Within 2 weeks after the launch, there were 15000 users and Slack bagged around $5 billion. It is said that valuable feedback collected by Metalab helped them to create a tool that reached 15000 users in two weeks.
Slack now has 3 million paying customers, 8 million users including giants such as IBM, BBC, Oracle, and earned 221 million last year and $900 in cash. This has also generated business for Metalab with Amazon, Google, and so on. Slack’s success story is considered one of the best stories in the IT industry.
GitHub, home of 64 million projects!
GitHub is an open-source coding site with the collaborative platform. GitHub wanted help with website design but has a poor budget for in-house employees. It then hired Chacon as a freelance consultant. Chacon had a vivid knowledge of git. He developed the backend website for GitHub which is now the home of 64 million projects. GitHub thus outsourced the most important feature of the site to an outsource developer who is now the Chief Information Officer of GitHub. GitHub now has 40 million users and earns around $140 million.
Whatsapp’s victory
Whatsapp is one of the most powerful apps in the world with 2 billion users. Before Facebook purchased Whatsapp, Whatsapp operated with just 30 full time and 5 part-time employees. On Outsourcing software developers from Russia, Whatsapp has begun its process with a starting capital of $250,000. It hosted only the customer support inshore.
Whatsapp co-founder Jan Koum said,
“There are excellent engineers there in Eastern Europe”.
Whatsapp even outsourced its iPhone app development to Igor Solomennikov who is later appointed as a full-time employee. However, after scaling, most of the Eastern Europe Developers are relocated to California, USA.
Alibaba’s big basket
The red dragon’s e-commerce company would have not reached a height of $54.5 billion without outsourcing. Because of the scarcity of talented developers in China, it outsourced its development to the US. JackMa, the founder of Alibaba, outsourced the website development and design to attract the bilingual audience. As it is outsourced to the US who are native English speakers a better communication alignment was modeled. Hence outsourcing has helped Alibaba to captivate both the local and foreign visitors.
Outsourcing stories like these portray how access to talent, offshore can greatly help with the development as well as the marketing of a company. These success stories proved the saying of Peter Druker,
“ Do what you do best, Outsource the rest”
SHRUTHE
