Borrow the Brainpower: How Outsourcing Cuts Costs and Ships Faster

Want to move faster without burning out your core team? In this episode, we unpack what it really means to borrow the brainpower—using managed services to turn cost savings into real product speed. By pairing immediate access to specialized talent with elastic capacity, teams can start building next week instead of waiting months to hire.

Instead of stalling on niche roles or sinking time into recruiting, HR, and IT overhead, outsourcing lets you redirect energy to the work that actually moves the roadmap. We break down the real math beyond hourly rates: reduced overhead, fewer operational distractions, and the compounding impact of faster time to market.

We get practical about where this model works best. From clearing the bottom of a stubborn backlog to spinning up focused delivery pods for three-to-six-month initiatives, managed services help protect your core team while still shipping upgrades customers notice. If you’ve ever felt trapped between hiring delays and slipping release dates, this conversation lays out a more flexible model with clear decision points and success metrics.

We also dig into why global perspective matters—especially for teams building video and app experiences at scale. Products designed around local assumptions often stumble due to network constraints, accessibility gaps, payment flows, or cultural norms. Distributed teams surface those blind spots early, helping you avoid costly rework and build products that travel.

We close with concrete takeaways: when to use dedicated teams vs project-based work, how to align rituals and SLAs, and what to measure to prove value across speed, quality, and cost.

If you’re ready to borrow the brainpower, ship faster, and widen your product’s reach, hit play. Subscribe for more candid operator conversations—and share this episode with the teammate who owns the backlog.

What we cover

• Cost savings from labor efficiency and reduced overhead
• Immediate access to specialized engineers and artists
• Faster time to market for features and launches
• Clearing backlog without distracting core teams
• Elastic scaling without hire-and-fire cycles
• Flexible engagement models that fit the work
• Global perspectives that improve product-market fit

Download the slides:
📄 Cost-Effective Media Operations
https://info.netint.com/hubfs/downloads/Cost-Effective-Media-Operations.pdf

Learn more about Arcadian: https://www.arcadian.com

Explore NETINT video encoding solutions: https://netint.com

This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NETINT Technologies.
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Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Speaker Intro
• 0:17 Why Outsource Instead Of In‑House
• 0:52 Cost Savings And Reduced Overhead
• 1:30 Instant Access To Specialized Talent
• 2:31 Faster Time To Market
• 3:03 Focus On Core Work And Backlog
• 3:46 Scale Up And Down With Flexibility
• 4:40 Global Perspectives For Better Products
• 5:37 Key Takeaways And Arcadian Services
• 6:56 Sponsor: Netint Technologies

Transcript

Voices of Video: 0:07

Voices of video. Voices of video. The voices of video. Voices of video.

Joe Waltzer, CEO, Arcadian: 0:17

Um Yeah, so as Anita said, I'm Joe Walter, CEO of Arcadian. Uh here to talk to you about honestly why you should work with us or any managed services company in general, but us in particular. Um so this is the title of our our presentation, but you know, let's sort of define that more. Obviously, we're talking about outsourcing, right? Moving some of your operations to other locations. Why would you do that? Why would you not just keep everything in-house? You know, why work with these sort of outsourced managed services companies? Um, so we're going to dive into why, and there's probably more reasons than you thought about. Uh so first, as Nina said, it's there's cost savings, and it's true. Uh moving your operations from where you are to different regions can lower your labor costs. I see nobody's here 20, 30%. Um, it sort of depends on the region and what you're currently doing, but you will save money. That's just the truth of it. The other thing you're going to save and try to think about is the uh overhead, recruiting, HR, IT, all of the support you need to manage those employees, those numbers also get reduced to. So there is a cost savings, it can be significant, um, but it's not the only reason to work with someone. You're not just doing this to save money. And here's why. So one of the things you get immediately when you work with that source company is you get specialized people with expertise in the things you need. And that's a big deal because hiring people is extremely difficult. If anyone has gone through a hiring process and tried to staff a particular engineer or a particular artist or someone that has a very distinctive skill, it can take months, it could take years, it depends on what you're looking for. When you work with a company like ours, you get those people immediately. They can be on your team the next week, we can have conversations the next day, you don't have to wait and build a team. This gets you started right away with whatever idea you're working with, whatever project you're working on, it begins as soon as you want it to. Um, there's no need to build internal capabilities from scratch. You don't have to hire an HR team, you're not gonna put desks in your office, all that stuff you're not thinking about. It goes away. You give someone like us a call, we're having conversations the next day about how to build the products you want to. So that's a huge advantage. Faster time to market, obviously, if you can staff up faster, if you can build a team faster, if they're ready today or tomorrow and not next week or next year or next month, you get your products out quicker than everyone else. That's a big deal for a lot of people. Small startups, you don't want to be waiting for a long time to build your for a long time to build your team. You want to get going now. This lets you do that. It's cost effective, it's easy, it's simple, it's a phone call away. It makes a big difference when you're trying to get out there before your competitors. Uh so it also allows you to focus on what your core business is, right? So a lot of these teams, you're not gonna hire your core engineering team from an outsourced company, but you will hire the team that's gonna build some of the projects that are maybe lower down your backlog. Let's all be honest, you all have a huge backlog, and there's some of those tickets at the bottom that you're never gonna get to. And they've been waiting on it for months. Products have been asking when they're coming for months, and you're saying you're gonna get to it, and you know it won't. This lets you build a team that lets you work on the things that are sort of on the periphery, the things you're not focused on, the things that you don't have the time for, you can attack those today, you can get those done, you can shift those features that maybe are the top of the list. So, scalability. If anyone's tried to ramp up a team quick, it's difficult. Again, hiring is a problem. This lets you scale up a team. You can double your team size in weeks, you can get those projects out the door, and you can bring that team size back down, which is another huge thing. Nobody wants to hire people to then fire them in six months, right? This is a the games industry, sorry, games industry, but we want to have a stable workforce. And so working with an outsource partner lets you staff up teams for temporary projects, side projects, things that make tick three, six months a year. You scale them down when you're done, and you can move on with your core business. Offers flexible engagement models. Uh, so dedicated teams can be staffed with your team, they can be project-based, they can be uh full-time contractors. You can sort of set it up what makes best sense for you and your team and how you want to operate. Lots of flexibility there. And then the one that I think gets missed a lot is when you bring in a lot of these teams, you bring in a global perspective. This is something that I think a lot of people miss. You have your team set up in the US, or you have it set up in Europe, or you have it set up wherever it is, and you're missing the perspective of people from other parts of the world. So you're building a video streeting app and you're making a bunch of assumptions about how it works, and it's the assumptions because your US team is in the US, and things are different there. You want to bring in people from all over. You get different perspectives, they have a different opinion and view of how these things should work for them and their cultures and their regions, and that can be really important when you're trying to make a global product. If you're building global apps, don't have a silo team in one country. You're gonna miss some things, you're gonna misunderstand the market. Bringing in teams from other regions, it really, really helps sort of diversify your opinions and your points. You can make a big difference with your consumers when you launch your products. So we're gonna summarize. Lower costs. I think everyone knows that outsourcing is probably where that conversation started. You want to lower your costs, it will lower your costs. But on top of that, immediate access to talented people, immediate days, maybe a week. You can start talking to people that know what they're doing that can solve your problem. Can't emphasize that enough. It's a big advantage. Let's you focus on what what's important for your company, right? Build the team you want around the core product you're trying to deliver, and then let these other teams fill in sort of the smaller priorities. Um, and then it's easy to scale. So I need to get a team up quick. I want to get to market fast. Hiring is a pain. Hiring takes some time. Don't have to deal with that anymore. Just scale immediately. And then that exposure to diverse markets that I think every product could use. Having people on your team, you have a different perspective on what works for the product you're making is a big advantage. And so that's Arcadian. This is what we do. We help people solve problems, we help people staff up and deliver great solutions, and these are our solutions. If you're interested in any of them, if you think any of them are something you could work with, if you're looking for that instant access to our video engineers, stop by the booth return over here. Come talk to me. Come talk to Mark. And that's it. That's our presentation.

Voices of Video: 6:56

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