My cofounder and I just launched a nearshore dev shop for startups. If “nearshore” is new to you, it means saving on costs by outsourcing to an agency in a nearby country with similar time zones .
Whether a startup should use a dev shop is an ongoing debate. Some people will say you can’t outsource your core competency and product development needs to be done in-house, but startups are also a super broad field and have many stages to them. My cofounder and I worked with several startups (both technical and non-technical founders) at a previous agency we helped run, so we know there is demand. We’re trying to gauge if there’s enough for a dev shop exclusively for startups.
We also all know that all of our opinions are formed by our experiences. There are a ton of awful dev shops out there and outsourcing companies are a dime a dozen. Our hypothesis is having a dev shop founded by a couple people with experience in the field, a deep understanding of both cultures (Mexico and US), and who actually give a damn about doing really good work makes a huge difference.
There are many, many, many nearshore and offshore dev shops. It’s saturated. Focusing on startups is our way of differentiating by capitalizing on our backgrounds.
We don’t want to put our heads in the sand and push blindly ahead. We read what people in the startup (for example, Y Combinator) and product development (for example, Marty Cagan) say and whether they think outsourcing is viable or not, we ask ourselves how we’d respond to each objection.
Right know we really want to hear from all of you. Do you think the idea of a nearshore dev shop for startups has merit? Does it depend on how good the dev shop actually is or are you opposed to it on principle?
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One challenge is that startup clients wouldn’t intend to stick with you. They eventually want their own team.
I run a dev shop focused on startups. We’re onshore though (all in the US) and charge $49 / hr.
The demand is definitely there, but I have a much easier sell since here in the US, offshore gets a bit of a bad rap, with so many of my clients getting burned from past experiences.
It’s called a venture builder and I get about 5 connection requests per week with similar propositions.
Outsourcing can work but early startups without a strong in-house dev team often don’t work because product knowledge isn’t retained.
I think you won’t get paid much but there is a market if you can provide it cheaply
I founded a dev shop that focused on startups many years ago, and eventually exited it. Its definitely a viable path, but you have to be really on point with what you’re doing. The early stage startup market is not the same as any other. And the sort of overarching zeitgeist has shifted away from this type of thing as an external consultancy and more towards an in-house startup studio type of model. That’s where most of these types of companies have moved overall.
I always thought that dev shops could do a faster, better and cheaper job if they specialized but in a “full code” solution. It seems like dev shops are either no-code (or Wordpress) focused OR they are just per-hour body shops that will fake their way through any language or app. Why not have a dev shop that becomes really good at MERN apps and can spin those out faster and faster and says, “I’ll do any app that you like but we have to use MERN.”
(Well, I’ll tell you why. The no-code/Wordpress guys can only do no-code/Wordpress so they HAVE to restrict themselves to those clients. The body shops find it easier to find clients if they just say, “We’ll do whatever you want for $50/hour.” And who cares if they totally fail and wipe out.)
With specializing in tech stack, do you think that will limit dev shop on number of clients/work they get? As a recently started dev agency who is trying to specialize on few tech stack (c#, go, react and few others on front end, any major cloud provider) I always think specializing will limit number of work we got but on other hand I also think we can build pretty good solutions and deliver faster as well with specialized tech stack…
I’ve worked with half a dozen shops at this point and some thoughts I have working with shops
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For a startup, velocity is everything. Most shops like waterfalls and aren’t very agile. Took nearly 24 hours to course correct due to the shops PM not available and no direct line to the Devs. Hated this.
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Code quality and context is lost without internal engineering. You need to have someone internal QC and know the code that’s been developed by the shop or else it’s pretty useless to build on top of.
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You can’t expect a dev shop to care for ur customers like a engineer with equity does. Oh there’s an edge case? Well it’s not in the design spec, whatever.
So far my best experience has been freelancers or gun but both options have been pretty expensive.
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