rwalling

For $6/hour I typically, though not always, get someone with a 4-year college degree.

While it can be hit and miss, just like hiring someone in your own country (in my case, the U.S.), if you screen them well you can find someone solid and reliable. One of my best VAs costs $3 per hour, but I had to go through 4 or 5 others before I found her.

>How do you find sufficiently qualified and trustworthy partners who are willing to remain on standby for tiny one-off tasks like these?

You spend time up front to find them. With a few hours of up-front work it's not very difficult.

>Moreover many of his bullets just make no sense whatsoever. How am I supposed to outsource "Fixing Post-Launch Bugs" (on my code-base)? Creating Unit Tests? Database Development?

We've outsourced post-launch bugs to a very talented developer who works for us 2-8 hours per week depending on the bugs we find.

Creating unit tests is one of the easiest development tasks to outsource, and you'll find out pretty quickly whether your object model makes sense when you assign this to someone who didn't build the objects themselves.

>I have personally witnessed more than one startup fail spectactularly because the CEO drank a bit too much of the outsourcing kool-aid.

But that doesn't mean outsourcing is bogus, or that it doesn't work.

>it still takes quite a bit of time to bring a contractor up to speed, even on small tasks.

If you're working on a credit card processing system you are correct due to the complexity. But most apps are not this complex, and you'd be surprised how quickly a solid developer can start fixing bugs on a system they've never seen before if they are talented and the architecture is sound.

You won't want to go with a traditional merchant account since the fees are typically $.30 per transaction plus 3%.

You'll either want to hit up PayPal's little known micropayment feature which runs $.05 per transaction plus 5% (https://www.paypal.com/IntegrationCenter/ic_micropayments.ht...), or use Amazon's Flexible Payments Solution which has a similar pricing model and is set up for developer integration.

YC funds startup with great growth potential; companies that can "scale" well. Service companies scale linearly, and require you to hire additional personnel to grow, whereas product companies scale exponentially compared to personnel.

So my guess is YC will not fund a service company.

I'm a hacker so I'm looking for either another hacker or someone with experience on the business/fund-raising side.

I run a .NET development firm and have about 10 years of experience building web apps. I've launched several of my own web apps and a couple products to various degrees of success (sold 2 of them for a small profit, 1 for a better profit, and one brings in about 20% of my income month to month).

If you're interested drop me a line. I'm willing to discuss things further (including the ideas), via email.

If this is obvious, why do we keep hearing the same stories over and over about how easy it is to succeed with software startups? The "low barrier to entry" and other stuff that's mentioned even in these comments?

Low cost of entry isn't really an advantage since everyone is experiencing it at once. Whom do you have an advantage over when we can all build the same website in the same amount of time and host it for the same amount of money?

As always, winning in this game comes down to building something unique that is also difficult for others to build, marketing, and luck. I don't think a lot people building new web apps these days understand this.

Perhaps, but with every media source erring on the other side of the argument, this article is simply a reality check, and has to err on the side of negativity to get its point across.