Automation and Outsourcing

When I first started doing web design, I accepted trades eagerly. It sounds great, doesn’t it? I’ll work for you, you work for me, it’s all very equitable and communistic. In theory.
However, I noticed that my projects that were paid for in trade didn’t always go the way I had hoped.

They would take a lot […]

Amazon had a service called the Mechanical Turk that lets people complete small tasks for a fee - or, on the flipside, submit tasks to be completed. It was originally designed to make it easy for developers to let humans do tasks that computers are very bad at - such as distinguish text within photos. But […]

This morning, I nervously contemplated this question: “If I asked my business what it really needs right now, what would it say?”
The answer came back:

a bookkeeper
a tax advisor
a full time programmer

Oy. Well you can guess why my business isn’t getting these. All my issues!
Letting people look at all my money dirty laundry is scary. Trusting […]

Right now I’m reading Tim Ferris’s book The Four Hour Work Week, and I’m deep in outsourcing mode. I’ve got an Indian company that I’m courting to redo my accounting system and I’m testing out VA (virtual assistant) companies.
Here are my tips so far:
1. Don’t get desperate and try to unload the store on someone. […]