Why Offshoring Makes Sense for Startups

It’s always exciting to start a new company. You finally have in your hand the opportunity to execute a great product idea that you’ve probably reflected upon for months or even years. Being a tech startup, your main goal is obviously to put your idea into production and bring it to the market in as little time as possible. You will also be engaged in a multitude of other activities, such as meeting with investors, partners, devising strategies, measuring analytics, adding features etc. Of course, having a great idea and starting your own company doesn’t automatically mean you have the technical expertise required to put your idea into production. Or maybe, you need more time and energy to focus on business aspects or innovation. Perhaps, there’s a lack of professionals with experience in the particular technology that you have to work with. Or maybe, there are people available to do the job, but they come at a premium price that you are unable to afford given the initial stage that you are in.

A lot of startups across the globe have solved these issues through offshoring. With the right budget and know-how, you can easily offshore your development to a reliable company that can manage the whole process for you so that you can start focusing on scaling your company. While the initial set up and customization of the offshoring team does take effort, once both sides are on the same page, you’re in for the long haul.

Here are the top five reasons why offshoring is so effective for startups:

Access to a high quality technical team with proven delivery capabilities: Engaging with a reliable and experienced offshoring provider gives you access to premium talent. In countries like India, there is a huge pool of highly skilled IT professionals that are always eager to take on exciting new challenges. With offshoring, you have an opportunity to hire the best talent in your industry for specific technologies that you want work on.

Cost-Effectiveness and the subsequent ROI: Yes, cost is indeed a major factor for any company to choose offshoring. This applies even more so to a startup. If you choose the right offshoring engagement model, you would be free of any hidden overhead costs. You can choose to hire a dedicated team that works in complete alignment with your own methods and expectations. This directly ensures an optimal cost-effective output. While cost savings is usually one of the biggest reasons for any company to offshore, this should definitely not be the only one. However, as a startup, cost savings could prove critical for you as you attempt to scale.

Control: Again, when you choose the right engagement model, you can ensure that you are in complete control over your offshore team at all times- right from the hiring stage to setting up processes and infrastructure to deliverables and deadlines.You can have the team work exclusively for you and have your offshoring partner supervise everything closely to ensure an efficient workflow. In fact, you offshore team works just as your in-house team!

Transparency and Flexibility:  Offshoring was once synonymous with shipping off a part of the development to an unknown team sitting in a country half the world away from you. That need not be the case anymore. With a dedicated team type of approach, you will have an immense amount of transparency and flexibility. If you are a part of the hiring process from the very beginning, you can also ensure that your team has a pretty keen sense of accountability. You can also solidify this by setting up very strong communication channels and aligning the offshore team to your goals, expectations and standards. You also have the flexibility to grow your team easily with the offshoring partner’s support.

On-Time Deliverables: With the right engagement model, the team is dedicated entirely to your product and cannot be reassigned elsewhere. With a team size that is appropriate for your requirements and right communication and collaboration between you and the team, you can easily mitigate the risk of delay in deliverables.

You can finally focus: With an offshore team set up, you can forego the need to spend excessive amounts of time on unnecessary constraints such as administrative and HR issues since the offshoring partner would already have an existing structure in place. The right partner would have in-depth knowledge and extensive experience building software products in a distributed environment and will use this experience towards building a team for you that will meet not just your development needs but also fit pretty neatly into your company culture so that you can focus harder on scaling your business.

If a mutually beneficial collaboration is put in place early on, engaging an offshoring team for your software product development can result in a time-efficient and win-win strategy for your startup. To learn more about how to choose the right offshoring partner, please download our free ebook