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(Due disclosure :-> I am Indian and work out of Bangalore these days ( I worked in the USA for a couple of years) and have been on both sides of the outsourcing contact. It can work for certain big enterprise projects, but probably never for a startup. )
My 2 cents
You may want to get a "virtual assistant" first to see how it goes. If you get burnt by that, you can cut your losses early. But chances are you will find a creative use for them that might give you a competitive edge.
Have you read "The 4-Hour Workweek"?
val = create_cat_res(create_res_val,ty,nm,pa,ow,tg,de,ic,f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,cty,oc,ors,rc,rr,c,r,u,d)I can code everything my startup needs, but we don't have a good graphic designer. I suspect that we could go a long way with a few mockups from a great designer.
Of course, good designers tend to be expensive, and I suspect hiring a really good one would blow through a good chunk of my savings :[
The most recent place I did some work outsourced work to India, and got code like this: val = create_cat_res(create_res_val,ty,nm,pa,ow,tg,de,ic,f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,cty,oc,ors,rc,rr,c,r,u,d)
Presumably, a YCombinator start-up is one where writing good code is the core competency, and a major competitive advantage. You don't outsource your core competency.
If you prefer, what must be true about coding for that strategy to work? How do you know that programming for your startup qualifies? (If you don't know anything about programming ....)
It's a terrible idea. I was in a startup that opened a China office, for about what it cost to hire 2 quality engineers in the U.S. However, the China office produced nothing . Moreover, it sucked up a lot of management time, so managers weren't actually around to, well, manage.
It would be great if you can learn and do it on your own, with the close knit team you put together. But if that is out of question and your choices are either to do nothing and stay with your boring job or outsource, I would say you outsource at least to see if it flies. You would at least have first hand experience of outsourcing by the the end of it. You may want to get a "virtual assistant" first to see how it go…
I am wary of outsourcing. I've done some work on RentACoder ... most of the people there want cheap work done for crap. I've picked up some projects where I ended up fixing mistakes from other people's code. They were candidates for a DailyWTF submission. Some of these people were from overseas, and some were from right here in the US.
However, outsourcing non-intellectual-property stuff like the virtual assistant or a bookkeeper -- that sounds like a great idea. You don't really want to be messing with non-code-related details while coding.