Outsourcing brings value — the kind of value which demands outreach on your part. It’s the kind of value expensive and unreliable hiring can’t provide. It’s also the kind of value that probably solve the global attrition problem.

All businesses, especially startups, have an inherent need to grow, scale, and expand. Except, that most businesses also don’t have excess cash in hand. That’s how businesses have identified the value of outsourcing and the tangible (and even intangible) benefits it brings to the table.

We aren’t the only ones harping over it. Nor are you the only business that mulled over the idea.

In fact, there are at numerous startups that have been built completely on the concept of outsourcing, remote teams, and virtual staff.

Here are some of those businesses and their respective stories:

Slack: When a startup makes a team collaboration and chat tool, would it be hard to believe that they would use the tool for themselves internally? Slack is a team chat and collaboration tool. While their core team sits in San Francisco and Vancouver (going remote already?), this is a startup that was built from ground up on the basis of outsourcing and remote work.

Upwork: Most businesses do know Elance/Upwork as a major platform for finding freelancers. For freelancers, it’s a gateway to find clients from all over the world. What was once Elance is soon to be merged into Upwork.com. What most people don’t know is that Elance-Upwork management comprises of a very few core team members but the bulk of the work is outsourced.

37 Signals: Jason Fried is the author of Rework — a book that advocates an entirely new way of running your business; just the way 37 Signals is managed. The company makes immensely popular products such as Basecamp, HighRise, and many others. However, the company completely depends on remote staff. In fact, the core team also doesn’t spend time with meetings and unnecessary huddles while still stationed at a location.

GitHub: Ever realized how powerful crowd-collaboration is? Apart from Wikipedia and open source software, there are also success stories such as GitHub — a git repository and hosting service — which is a humongous community of developers from all over the world (over 10 million strong). The entire community wants to develop great software.

AppSumo: Think of AppSumo as Groupon for Software, online products, digital products, and SaaS applications. Started by Noah Kagan, AppSumo uses outsourcing across all the business fronts — from deal sourcing to management, and from marketing to web Development.

John Rampton of Entrepreneur.com lists out a huge list of 25 startups and businesss that made outsourcing their secret weapon to grow into very successful businesses. If you aren’t using outsourcing, you are losing out on the potential. It could very well be a stupid thing to do, without you knowing it.

Of course, for us at Kalpavruksh, we live and breathe outsourcing. We believe that outsourcing has tremendous potential for Startups and businesses all over the world. For instance, see how we put ISV on steroids.

We also host Mission Mumbai to take you through our development center here in Mumbai and show you how outsourcing is done for our Scandinavian clients.

How do you use outsourcing, if at all?