I do business development for an Onchain R&D Studio called STRGL. We specialize in designing exceptional UI/UX for web 3 companies. One of my current focus areas is growing our clientele and in the process of talking to potential clients I’ve come across certain pain points which motivated me to write this article. I’ll be exploring why outsourcing in general is often a very feasible option and on the other hand when in-house is the best option. I plan on writing an article series on different subjects which will hopefully effectively illustrate more broadly why STRGL is an exceptional design partner. I’d like to write much more long form content in general so writing this helps me build the routine and it also serves my work at STRGL. Win-win!
Quick shill:
STRGL is a partner to many prominent web 3 companies including Chainlink, Orb, Equilibrium Group, Phaver, Flowstate Games, Ray Browser, Six Capital and many other great companies and public sector organizations. When it comes to our recent work I’d like to highlight our work with Orb as we did the whole redesign for their V2 dAPP. That has been getting a lot of praise from the Lens community. All in all we have been exclusively working with web 3 cases since the start of 2022 as we wanted to fully commit to the decentralized vision of the future. You can go to our website and browse many of our references if you are interested.
Allright! Let’s get to the point of this article which this time is to try and explain why outsourcing can be a very powerful tool to scale your company and to get things just right.
What is outsourcing?
Outsourcing means contracting out certain business functions or processes to third-party service providers. So instead of hiring a full design team a company might hire one in-house product manager or designer and then extend the design capabilities when needed with an outsourcing partner. Or they might leave the design work completely for an outsourcing partner. In-house on the other hand means hiring an employee who is directly on the company payroll. In general outsourcing partners can easily be an extension to an existing team so it is not always apparent how “in-house” everything truly is.
So what are the benefits?
1. Cost effectivity
Hiring full-time employees is costly and a long term commitment that should not be taken lightly. Finding the right candidate can also prove to be challenging. Outsourcing can seem expensive in the short term as usually the pay per hour is higher than for in-house work. But on the other hand you’ll pay for work only when you need it rather than all year round so in most cases it is very cost effective.
2. Scalability
There might not be use for the design team's capacity all year round. You can’t really downsize and upscale the team easily with the changing company demand. During slower times you are gonna have too many people on the payroll or not enough hands when a major design project comes behind the corner. With a high quality outsourcing partner you can easily scale the team size up and down to fit the demand.
3. Specialized experts
With STRGL for example you’ll get help from designers who have extensive expertise on building UI/UX especially for decentralized dAPPS, games and platforms. They know the customer base and have a clear vision on what could work for the client’s specific needs. Ideally this id further verified through research validating this with customer testing.
4. Focus on core competencies
You get to do what you do best and we get to do what we do best which in this case is world class UI/UX for your product.
Common concerns
1. Quality
This is where tediously vetting your outsourcing partner comes into play. You should go through their references with care and if possible ask their former clients about their experience. You can also ask the outsourcing partner for case studies and all sorts of materials which you could go through to verify their standard of work.
2. Loss of control
We at STRGL establish clear communication channels and recurring meetings to keep the client in the loop. Revisions can also be done if needed. We very rarely have to do revisions though. This aspect in general is maybe more relevant to other kind of work rather than design.
3. Communication barriers
We are mainly working from the UTC+2/+3 time zone depending on the season as we are based in Helsinki, Finland. We will establish the meeting schedule and communication timing to accommodate a convenient time for our client whatever the time zone. We are also reachable 24/7 if need be. Most of the people working for us are native Finns but we are known for our clear and proficient english.
4. Price
Why shouldn’t you just use a cheaper freelancer? Well there is a lot of variety between freelancers and in general you get what you pay for. We at STRGL pride ourselves in our processes which have been refined through years of design work and especially working with different web 3 companies and different protocols under the hood. The quality assurances are often flimsier with freelancers and it might be harder to audit their capabilities in advance. They also don’t have as much at stake reputation wise as we as an established company. We wanna keep our clients happy as we’ll be working within the industry long into the future, when a freelancer might split to a whole different industry or get a full-time job somewhere at any point of time. Of course if you are low on financial resources, say if you are 100% bootstrapping your project and are building a MVP, finding a freelancer is feasible and probably the only option. If you do so you should use the same kind of due diligence as I’ve described in the quality section above.
5. So you mean our in-house designer is bad?!
That can sometimes be the case as well but at times the demand for design can skyrocket and it might make more sense to get outside help rather than hire another designer. A fresh perspective might be needed too.
Wen to outsource and wen stay to in-house?
Hints that indicate you might wanna outsource:
1. Specialized expertise is required
If the project requires specialized skills that your team lacks it is probably a good idea. When you need the best, get the best.
2. Scalability is needed
When the demand for this expertise is fluctuating and you need to quickly scale up and down.
3. Cost-effectivity is a priority
With a high quality partner you’ll get the same results as with an expensive in-house team and you won't have to burn as much capital year round.
When it could be a better idea to stay in-house:
1. It’s a core competency
The tasks or projects at hand are central to the company’s core competencies and strategic objectives. You can still extend your teams with an outsourcing partner if need be but it might be best to keep the core in-house.
2. Highly sensitive or confidential material
Keeping things in-house can help mitigate security risks. You can keep all the computers in the office and monitor people with access to the sensitive material better. It’s good that for most companies these kinds of security protocols are unnecessary. A lot depends on choosing a trustworthy outsourcing partner as well. We at STRGL have very strict NDA’s with our clients. We also have physical offices and very high criteria for our employees. On the other hand a loosely associated freelancer group might not even have seen each other ever. How can they assure the client of confidentiality?
3. Long-term predictable higher demand
If the workload is consistent and possibly needs several people it’s probably better to go in-house.
Thats it!
I hope reading this post gives you some tools when you are considering hiring and outsourcing matters. Feel free to reach out if I can help you with anything and of course especially if your company has a need for world-class design! Go explore our webpage!
