Developing open source technology takes considerable effort and time, especially if you are working alone. Outsourcing certain tasks to others can be an effective method for producing work that is of higher quality much more quickly than you can do on your own. Here are a few areas that can be outsourced in the development of open source hardware.
- Research – Market research is something that can be outsourced so you can identify where your business can create the most value, and to ensure there are customers for the product you would like to create.
- PCB Design – There are many people out their who are highly specialized in PCB design and who can complete it quickly and elegantly.
- Product Page – Creating an attractive page that highlights your products can be a time consuming task that takes away from your time on important development work.
- Marketing – Developing and executing promotional plans for your product can be outsourced easily to marketers who specialize in it.
Finally, outsourcing means you will be working with a distribute team, meaning communication and project management is extremely important in order to maintain forward progress. Task management, collaborative document editing, and team chat software are all essential tools to making a distributed team work.
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