I’ve been struggling to find someone to do some work for me so that I’m not doing everything myself. I posted up something on Reddit about it a few weeks back and got a message today. I thought my reply was worth posting here.

Hi Tom, No, didn’t find anyone. To be honest I don’t really understand how I can really out-source much of my work without building a strong on-going relationship with someone, and that’s really only ever going to happen with an employee. Right now I can’t afford an employee.

I’ll give you an example. I post weekly tips for using my products better to Facebook. I can’t outsource the selection of the tips, it’s something that someone who does tech support for my product needs to do. So, that means I do it. So I spend a couple of hours every month writing tips. Then I could outsource the actual posting to FB and Google+. But you know what, that takes about 2 minutes. So no real point. Another example is writing user guides. I’ve tried outsourcing this multiple times and the outcomes are just rubbish, it needs someone intimately familiar with my products for it to work. And that’s only going to happen with an employee that spends multiple hours working the products and supporting them. I’d love to find someone to create flash demos for my products too, but I have exactly the same problems.

I’ll run a task past you and see if it’s something you think that fits within your skillset. My products are HR/time tracking/payroll based. B2B 100%. I have multiple free resources available on the websites that are designed to bring quality traffic to my site. Generally they are “inspired” by other free resources I find around the internet. For example, right now I am building a simple employee shift schedule tool in Excel. As I basis I use other templates I find around the internet, improve on them, put some smart formulas in Excel to automate some of it, and hey presto free resource. I am careful that they are “inspired” by other free resources rather that slavishly copied. I then write a 500-1000 word keyword targeted article on the tool, publish in WordPress, link to it from a few relevant internal pages on my website, post an update to FB and Google+ and job done. All up about 4-6 hours work.

If I provided you with a link to another tool along those lines that I need done would you take a look and let me know if it’s something that would fit in your skillset? Right now I’ve got three more of these tools I need developing and I’d happily pay someone to do so. However, what I am not happy doing is spending 10 hours explaining what I need done and then 10 hours doing it again because it’s rubbish. And that’s been my experience to date. Here’s a tool I’d like created:

*link removed*

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks for taking the time for reading all of this. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
By the way, I take a long time to respond to things on Reddit as I’ve locked myself out of accessing it during office hours (it’s a terrible yet compelling time-waster). Also, your PATH link isn’t going where it should I think. I am not sure at all what PATH is and would appreciate some more information.

Mark