Hiring an Offshore Development Team in 2024: A Complete Guide for Startup Founders

All you need to know on why and where to hire a dedicated offshore software development team for your early-stage startup

Imagine. You are in the middle of the Y Combinator startup program. You have been working hard on your product idea for a couple of months already, but you’ve just realized that you must pivot. You are 100% confident that you need to develop this new disrupting product or feature to prove that your idea is worth investing in. And now you’ve got only one month to build something completely new and present it in front of venture investors at Demo Day. However, you lack technical expertise for this particular feature or product and need help. Don’t panic, as there’s a solution: to hire an offshore development team.

Should you skip in-house hiring for outsourcing?

Our answer is yes. But before we unveil all the secrets of successful hiring overseas, you need to consider the following essential factors to survive and succeed in a dynamic environment of a startup:

1. Avoid conflicts between the co-founders, as those conflicts can ruin your startup at the very beginning. According to Noam Wasserman, Harvard Business School professor, 65% of startups fail precisely because of that.
2. Get everything done quickly. The faster the product enters the market, the better it is for the startup.
3. Pay a reasonable price. As a rule, investors fund the SAAS companies only after seeing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to validate your business model. Therefore, it’s crucial to remain within the budget (typically not that huge) when creating the MVP.
4. Retain high quality. You must maintain the balance between your MVP’s speed, price, and quality.
5. Use the advantage of remote work (especially since during the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone is working remotely) to cut costs.

Sounds challenging? It is. However, if you hire offshore developers, you will leverage all of the above issues and create an MVP to impress the investors.

Why Hire Offshore Developers for Your Startup?

The reasons for companies prefer software development outsourcing over in-house development are as follows:

• It’s a cost-effective product development strategy. Quartz reports that 37% of startups fail because they run out of money. However, this issue is doubtful to happen if you hire offshore developers. You will not be spending your funds on overhead costs such as office rent, payroll, insurance benefits, vacations, recruitment fees, etc. Instead, you will be directing the funds to the most binding domain – creating an MVP. Moreover, due to the lower cost of living, the rates of developers in offshore countries are typically much more reasonable than those of their American and Western European counterparts. Hiring a dedicated development team from Eastern Europe, India, or Latin America can be twice or even three times cheaper than in the US. 
• Increased productivity and save time. A team of offshore developers can not only reduce costs but also speed up the development process and thus save your precious time. As you already know, time is crucial for any startup because each startup is born in a competitive setting. In addition, with a dedicated development team, you will not spend any time training new employees, as each outsourced developer has their skills already in place. Finally, you will not spend any time on project management routine or HR activities such as employee retention – a vendor development company will handle all of those tasks. As a result, you will focus only on work and nothing else.
• More talent than you would find on site. IT outsourcing gives you access to a larger pool of talents than you would find onsite. For example, most of the developers in California are the employers of the tech giants. They receive enormous wages, benefit from attractive perks, and feel relatively safe and comfortable with their current employers, whereas startups imply risks; hence it is much harder to hire developers for a startup in the USA. On the contrary, offshore countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are full of skilled developers that would gladly join your startup, instead of other companies that require them to move out of state in order to join the team.

• Flexibility. It will be challenging to scale your in-house team or change the technology stack conforming to the project stage and scope. However, such changes are widespread for startup environments, so flexibility is crucial. The good news is that the outsourcing developers are flexible, and you can quickly move them between the projects, especially if you collaborate with them via a dev shop.
• Fewer conflicts. Startups typically result from personal relationships between the co-founders that eventually evolve into business relationships. Business interactions may differ from personal ones, so this can cause conflicts and misunderstandings. For example, a guy you have known for ages may show a dark side of their personality while in business. However, an offshore development team can help you avoid such conflicts at the MVP building stage.

As you see, hiring offshore developers can streamline your startup. After all, outsourced teams developed Skype, Slack, Github, and many others.

Hiring Outsourcing Developers: Where to Start?

Before you hire developers for a startup, make sure you follow the checklist:

• Define your business goals and be ready to communicate them. First, identify the problem you plan to solve with your initial MVP, as you will have to explain this problem when outsourcing developers. Next, determine the primary goal of your product that should be fulfilled, break it down into smaller, measurable milestones, and set approximate deadlines for those milestones.
• Evaluate the skill set for the project. First, identify the technology stack(s), expertise, and skills you need for your project. Next, define which roles you need for the project. For example, do you need only the developers, PMs, QAs, or business analysts?
• Plan the budget. Budget is often a pitfall for any startup, so you must plan it until the very last penny. Define the size of your initial capital and the areas where you can save money, leaving only the most important ones. Find the investors whom you are going to show your MVP beforehand.

Collect information about offshore locations. There’s a wide variety of offshore countries to choose from, each of which has its advantages and challenges. Shortlist the countries closest to you in terms of time zone and culture and consider the best offshore development price/quality ratio.

How to Find a Developer for Your Startup

Now that you have fulfilled all of the necessary prerequisites, it’s time to move on to the next stage and hire development teams. You can find a dedicated development team for your startup via the following sources:

• Recommendations (referrals) from people who you know
• Networking on conferences, hackathons, and meetups and sharing business cards with attendees for easy contact sharing
• Searching for the developers or teams at freelance portals
• Looking for developers at tech talent marketplaces
• Searching for the offshore developers or teams via social media or LinkedIn
• Using the services of offshore software development agencies

Asking for the help of local recruiters

Offshore Software Development Challenges

Outsourcing offshore developers are for sure beneficial for your startup, but be prepared for the following challenges when looking for potential candidates:

Time Zone Differences

The most common IT outsourcing destinations are Latin America (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay, etc.), Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Armenia, etc.), and South-East Asia (especially India). If your offshore development team is from another time zone, it may be hard for you to synchronize the time when both the in-house and offshore guys are online. However, you can turn this challenge into an advantage by choosing the correct time zone. For example, if you are in New York and hire a dedicated development team based in Ukraine, you will get only 7 hours of difference. Besides, Ukrainian time is ahead of New York time, meaning that the Ukrainian software engineers may already have lunch when you wake up. And the good news is that they have already completed some work before lunch, so it’s ready for you to review. 

On the contrary, if you hire an offshore team of developers from India, you will get more than 10 hours difference and, more importantly, in another direction. It means that your offshore team members will still be asleep when you start your working day, which may hamper your workflow. Nevertheless, modern timezone management tools can help you overcome this challenge no matter which country you choose.

Lack of Face-to-Face Communication

“Offshore” means “located in another country,” so it’s evident that there will be a specific barrier between the in-house startup founders and remote developers. However, there’s a solution: you can visit the offshore team location from time to time, personally meet your remote colleagues, spend some time together, and break the ice. Believe it or not – such travels would cost you less than a startup failing because of hiring mistakes. Another solution is to hold regular video conferences and start them not with the work-related questions straight ahead but with small talk about what’s currently going on in your lives.

Too Many Vendors to Choose From

The abundance of software development vendors on the offshore market can bring you both benefits and confusion. It’s hard to choose between thousands of agencies that offer you to hire offshore developers and build trust with them. You may spend a lot of time vetting outsourcing agencies through platforms, and in the end, still choose wrong. YouTeam will help you to find the developers using the best practices of outsourcing tech talents.

Cultural Differences

When working with offshore development teams, you must understand the difference between low and high-context cultures.

The shared context culture is:

• specific for the US and Europe, including Eastern Europe;
• relies on words and facts;
• task-oriented;
• deadline oriented;
• logical;
• open to changes;
• based on the agile methodology.

The high context culture is:

• specific for China, India, Philippines, and other Asian countries;
• relies on trust and emotion;
• team-oriented;
• not deadline oriented;
• intuitive;
• reluctant to changes;
• based on the waterfall methodology.

If possible, we recommend hiring offshore developers whose culture is closer to yours. As a result, you will not have to spend extra time understanding the new culture and getting used to it. You may also hire a few dedicated software developers from the same country or region, creating fast workflow and easing communication.

How to Hire Offshore Developers for a Startup

So how your hiring process should look like, and what are the signs of a perfect offshore development team? Here’s a checklist of how to hire developers for a startup:

• Create a detailed job description. Make sure you’ve listed the functionality of your project and all the right skills a developer has to have to fit the job.
• Find out if the developer or outsourced team has a proven track record. Look up their ranking at websites such as Clutch, see if they have a profile on LinkedIn, and find out with which clients they have already interacted. If possible, contact their previous clients and ask if they can recommend this remote team or developer. If you’re a non-technical founder, make sure your technical co-founder (if you have one) genuinely wants to contribute to the selection process. If you don’t have a technical co-founder, hire an IT consultant (an experienced tech person) to help you make the right decision if you have hesitations.
• Make sure that you have access to the latest code. Unfortunately, the developer may refuse to release the code because of possible personal conflicts. Therefore, we recommend that access to the code is one of the prerequisites for the project’s participation. Besides, you should be the owner or admin of all related accounts at Github, TFS, clouds, or other platforms.
• Ask the outsourcing development company about their workflow. Find out how they interact with their clients and allocate developers to projects. Ask if they are flexible enough, i.e., if they can add more developers in the course of a project. It may happen that the development company’s workflow may not suit your needs, so better know this before you hire a remote team and sign the contract. Do not forget about the NDA (non-disclosure agreement); you’re also free to request the NDA signature even before the dev team starts working, e.g., during the interviews.
• Reject the cheapest quotes. Focus on cost-efficient solutions. With the cheap quotes, you may end up paying more at the end of the project because someone else will have to rewrite the poorly written code. And once again — never feel ashamed to ask for Stack Overflow or GitHub profiles of developers to check the code quality.
• Check if the remote team agrees with everything you offer or would prefer to argue. If the developer or software development company says that they can fulfill each of your requirements, it’s an alarm sign. It means that they have not thoroughly studied your needs to see if they can align them with their available skill sets. Each web dev shop specializes in different skill sets, and none of them can do everything you want without any adjustments unless it’s a fraud. 
• Find a good project management tool. Collaboration tools make offshore development much more convenient. Exchanging lengthy emails is an outdated method of project management. Use modern project management, tracking, and collaboration tools such as Slack, Jira, Trello, etc. As a result, you will clearly see the tasks and progress of your team, lead discussions, leave comments, and quickly get to the point.
• Be proactive. Proactiveness is one of the essential soft skills of a startup founder, especially when working with an offshore development team. Try to be one step ahead of the next day’s tasks, especially if your remote team members are awake and working while you are asleep. As a result, you will feel confident that everything remains on track when you wake up.
• Insist on frequent deployment. Ask your offshore developers to show you the demo of the MVP at the end of each sprint, typically on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Finally, make sure that your team:

• Understands your instructions and assignments. In some cultures, people fear showing that they don’t understand something. Your task is to inform them that it’s okay to ask questions. Better solve all of the issues initially than try to sort them out when it gets too late. If you feel that they say what they think you want to hear, bring up this issue.
• Understands your business and has at least one similar project in their portfolio.
• Has experience working with startups.

Outsourcing Developers via Tech Talent Marketplace

Startup founders are typically open-minded people with brilliant and innovative ideas, eager to bring them to life. Therefore, it’s apparent that they seek new solutions as entrepreneurs and users to simplify their workflow and even revolutionize it. We at YouTeam understand the young entrepreneurs and their pains like no one else because YouTeam is also a startup. Founded by many enthusiasts in Ukraine, one of the leading offshore countries, YouTeam offers a new collaboration between the startup founders and a dedicated development team. Here’s what our workflow looks like:

1. We collaborate with and create a database of the 500+ software development houses from Europe and Latin America that have undergone a strict vetting process.
2. We provide a tech talent marketplace with the profiles of 50,000+ vetted engineers working at those dev shops on a full-time basis.
3. Our clients create accounts at the platform, meet with our representative to describe their needs, and access the developer profiles. After the customer submitted the application, we carefully select the best candidates and pre-interview them to find the best matching ones. YouTeam needs up to 48 hours to provide you with the first selected engineers.

4. The clients can choose a team to work with according to their requirements and then personally interview the members of this team. 
5. The client signs the contract with the software development company responsible for the team of their choice and kicks off the project in two weeks.
6. The software development supplier handles all overhead issues such as payroll, office space, sick leaves, vacations, etc.

Who can you hire with YouTeam?

When you hire offshore developers with YouTeam, you don’t need to hire the whole team with PMs, designers, and so on. Instead, you may choose engineers for different roles based on the technologies and seniority level you need to cover your project. Down below, we provide a quick overview of dedicated development team roles: 

• Front-end development team. The front-end developers work on implementing the visual aspects of the software, focusing on graphical elements, user interface design, and user experience. The core technologies for front-end developers are HTML, CSS, DOM, and JavaScript.
• Back-end development team. The back-end developers are responsible for the server-side aspects of the software. They provide the APIs and code their front-end colleagues use for software development. Back-end development connects the client-side part with the server-side and works together as a system. Back-end developers work with server-side languages (Ruby, Python, Java, PHP, Node.js, etc.), databases (i.e., MySQL, MongoDB), and API (JSON, AJAX, SOAP).
• Full-stack development team. Full-stack developers can work within all the layers of web development: frontend, backend, and database. Of course, it doesn’t mean they are good at all levels, as there are also different types of full-stack developers. Still, they can code programs, web applications, or mobile apps (Android, iOS application development), coordinate development processes, or fix the problem at any layer. 
• DevOps engineer. A DevOps engineer is in charge of bridging the gap between the software development and IT processes to speed up and optimize its development, testing, and release.

Quality assurance team. The QA engineers team ensures your quality specifications and standards throughout the project. They are also responsible for detecting and reporting bugs within the MVP software.

Why Hire Offshore Developers for Startup with YouTeam?

Here are the key reasons for deciding to hire offshore developers with YouTeam:

• Broad choice of software developers. YouTeam gives you access to a much wider pool of high-quality with many years of experience offshore developers than you would get when cooperating with a traditional offshore development agency.
• Only the trusted dev shops. Dev shops featured on YouTeam undergo a multistage screening process, during which we decide if we can entrust our clients to it. 
• Ability to scale the team. The scope of any startup project constantly changes at the MVP stage. We at YouTeam know this like no one else, so we allow our clients to ramp up their engineering team by adding a few developers instantly.
• Good reviews from previous clients: YouTeam clients fully trust the platform’s vetting process and choose to stay with YouTeam after trying our matching service.
• There is no need to wait for months. With traditional outsourcing developers, you may wait for quite a long time until your team’s formation and the project’ start. With YouTeam, the entire process will take 48 hours to meet candidates and two weeks for hiring an entire development team.

Hiring an offshore development team for a startup: FAQ

The Bottom Line

The best option for a tech startup is to hire an offshore development team. In such a way, startup founders will save their funds and time while receiving a high-quality MVP. However, before hiring a startup developer, you must clearly define your requirements, determine the required skill set, plan the budget, and start looking for offshore locations. Besides, be aware of challenges that you may encounter when hiring offshore developers – specifically, time zone differences, lack of personal communication, and cultural differences.

Additionally, consider the following aspects:

• Proven track record
• Access to the latest code
• Unreliability of the cheapest quotes
• Time & materials payment model vs. fixed price model
• Not letting the team agree with everything you say
• Good project management tool
• Proactivity
• Frequent deployment

YouTeam talent marketplace is one of the best platforms for startups that need offshore developers. Founded in Ukraine, one of the leading offshore countries, YouTeam connects the developers from the best dev shops with the clients, whereas the dev shops take over any related overhead costs. We carefully select only the best dev shops and offer benefits such as scalability, secure payment, quick interaction, and access to a broad tech talent pool. Consider us if you are seeking a dedicated development team for your startup.