I definitely don't think it makes sense for early stage startups to work with a vendor - there is too much iteration happening during the search for PMF. Where

I definitely don't think it makes sense for early stage startups to work with a vendor - there is too much iteration happening during the search for PMF. Where we see it start to make sense is when the company is hitting acceleration. At that point it doesn't scale to do side-by-sides for training. It becomes necessary to manage large number of high-turnover employees and become really good at hiring and training them. It's really specialized. Most tech companies that have scaled - Uber, Amazon, Google etc etc use outside providers. Which isn't to say that even when we get brought in (usually at around the 6 person mark in the blog post) that we don't spend a TON of time making sure that the communication between the front line agents and product/engineering isn't really good.