I am probably also from the same region. Based on my experience, “communication” is critical to building trust with your US clients.
Many APAC developers have excellent technical skills, but the client may have less confidence in them due to their personality or the language barrier. Having at least one native speaker in the initial meeting helps clients be confident that you can fully understand their requirements and communicate smoothly with them.

Our dev team uses Jira to track bugs and Quire for overall progress. There are also many other options out there.

The founder of my former company had no money and no connections. They published their solution on an open-source platform as open source, and it was a big hit! That’s when opportunities and funds started to reach out to them.
The bottom line is that their product really works.
They started it as a side project to solve their own pain point when building their main project, and they decided to publish it because they found it useful. Obviously, many other users had the same problem and their solution was helpful!