When two college friends founded Macphun in 2008 and subsequently released their first wildly popular application Cartoonatic – they never would’ve anticipated the success (and increase in workflow) that they would face. Paul Muzok the founder of Macphun, Belgium Email List is responsible for creating a software development company that specializes in providing user-friendly SaaS software to photographers of all skill levels, world-wide. After rave reviews on their debut app, they continued to produce photo-editing apps that consistently top the App Store charts.
While their applications were receiving awesome recognition and they grew to over 22 million customers worldwide, they still sought to streamline some of their essential business processes anyway they could. Kevin, VP of Macphun tells us that he considered outsourcing so they could be able to support their customers in a professional manner and free up the internal employees that were previous working with customer support in order to help Macphun grow and be more productive.
“We definitely did respond to customer inquiries by email and phone, but again it took man-power within the company that we could otherwise deploy in other ways.” – Kevin La Rue, Macphun.
Now this is just one small niche of outsourcing, but each sub-category all share the same purpose, which brings us to the core of this guide
HOW CAN OUTSOURCING HELP YOU GROW? (and what you need to know)
So incase you’ve gotten this far and still don’t know what outsourcing is exactly… here’s a short and straight to the point definition by Merrill Matthews of Forbes.
Outsourcing is when a company contracts with an outside person or company to provide some product or service, such as bookkeeping, payroll processing or janitorial services, or more complicated functions like marketing or IT services. And families do the same thing when they turn to professionals for major plumbing, air conditioner or car repairs.
While outsourcing is typically seen as a maintenance strategy for some immense corporations like GE, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle – it has also recently been popularized as a growth strategy for many lower-level startups that need to prioritize more important areas. Startups like Skype, BBBORG Slack, Uber, AirBNB, etc., are known for their use of outsourcing processes from coding and development to marketing and customer support. Nancy Mann Jackson from Entrepreneur backs this up by saying, “Entrepreneurs have long seen outsourcing as a strategy reserved for big business, but technology has made it a more accessible tool for small businesses and for some small firms, outsourcing has made a powerful impact on their growth, productivity and bottom lines.
