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?

  • Ca1yps@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve worked with half a dozen shops at this point and some thoughts I have working with shops

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.