I know an outsourcing agency owner who spends $5K on Linkedin to find 1 client but I can’t spend that much money because I am just starting out. I didn’t keep in touch with him so I’m asking you instead.
When we talked he said I’d buy manhours for $20/hr in my country and sell for $30/hr in his country. He was a nice dude and said I should give it a try.
PS. I have a CS degree but I remember nothing. I got D from OOD course
If it was easy everyone would do it. Marketing and sales.
Marketing and sales how?
Beats me, I don’t work in those fields. You have a product/service you’re trying to find customers for (marketing) and get them to buy it from you (sales).
Hmm maybe I should get MYSELF hired first as a contractor. And then I should outsource that work. And then repeat that process?
I am trying to come up with a plan I can execute. Execute can mean working for 1000 hours
all of them do, but they also don’t want to lose a lick of production. I guarantee though if they had an aladins lamp and could get all their work for cheap offshore with the exact same end result they would take it in a heart beat.
The ones that take it would survive. The rest would lose their market share and fail out.
There is an insane spam of people trying this on LinkedIn. Not judging, just saying it’s quite a saturated market.
I once got a Director job title, I immediately got 2-3 messages like that per day.
What might be a better alternative?
I have no idea. Our company was a very small team, my Director title was not something I’d consider to be serious, I was barely a team lead. I’m just saying that there must be a huge spam tsunami on LinkedIn if they even found me.
I’d consider direct networking? Who do you know personally? IDK if I’d hire an outsourcing outfit from a cold call. Even if someone would, chances are you won’t be the first to contact them.
Would you want to help me with this project? I can tell you what I’m doing and ask for your perspective.
I can ask my old professors if they know any US-EU based companies that need cheap talent.
I have a great background on paper.
At worst I can try to find investors. Guy I talked to said it would be easy to get investment. He didn’t choose that path because they asked 40% for $100K. I could start with this version, and then learn how this works, and then do it in another country solo
A few questions: where are you and where do you want your clients to be? What services do you offer, and how do they differ from competing outsourcing companies?
Does it matter that much?
Yes. For example there are many companies in India serving clients in the US. So you would need to know how you differentiate yourself from them. We work with a company who does graphic design, and their big value prop is their ability to snap to US business practices. So, they are more expensive that some, but they create an easy way to work with them. They also work 12 hours difference, which is handy. In contrast, I have worked with people in Columbia, who are roughly in the same time zone. Their big value is price.
Ah ok. Thanks for explaining. The guy I talked to was talking about his country and my country. He is buying software developer labor from Philippines. Compared to Philippines, workers in my country are more educated. Culture is more similar. Timezone difference is a few hours instead of half a day. But manhours cost $20/hr instead of $8/hr according to what he said.
I don’t feel confident in my understanding of what exactly businesses need and what exactly workers offer them and how exactly I should act as a “matchmaker”. Would you be down to help me figure this out by any chance? :D
Extra info in case it matters:
- I can physically be in any EU country to do this, and I can stay as long as needed.
- Being in the US physically would be pretty difficult but I can definitely incorporate there.
- I worked as a graphic designer, developer, SE marketer for my own projects a long time ago. I don’t know how up to date I should be and I’m not sure what outsourcing services I should offer. Do you have any advice?
I know a guy from Ukraine who was doing this on fiverr and was making quite a lot of money from US clients. He was doing PCB design though so don’t know how well fiverr works for other fields.
Maybe checkout the platform?
He was operating as an outsourcing agency or working as a PCB designer?
Ah sorry maybe I misunderstood the post.
He was a freelancing PCB designer but pretty much got consistent jobs and in the end longer contracts from this platform.
Sorry again, misunderstood your post as looking to do freelancing and how to find companies that would be looking to outsource jobs to freelancers.
No worries :)
