Essay
Why I Don't Invest in 'Outsourced' Startups
Chris Neumann Free Intermediate
An investor lays out the real risks of handing your core build to an agency: lost knowledge, agency incentives for speed over quality, and schedule slippage you cannot control. Reading it helps you decide what to keep in house and why the first milestone should be small enough to test how the agency actually works. It is a useful counterweight before you sign anything large.
- Agencies optimise for finishing fast and cheap, which is not your goal.
- You lose the lessons a team learns by solving the problem itself.
- Keep the core close, and prove the agency out on something small first.
