Starting up your online business presence you inevitably face the dilemma – hire an in-house development team, or take chances and go full outsourcing. Fair enough, like any choice in business, it brings dire consequences and needs to be taken seriously and cautiously. Except for it’s no longer an uncharted territory and you no longer have to “take chances”. Most of the Fortune-500 companies, including Google and Apple, choose to outsource web development, so why not you?
We’ve been delivering outsourced full-stack development, product code reviews, and UI/UX design since 2006 and, with time and experience, came up with our
Ultimate list of benefits of outsourcing software development
#1 Cost optimization
Among the top reasons to outsource web development, this one is the most obvious. How much does it cost to outsource web development? Much less than hiring an in-house team. Outsourcing was invented to leverage cost management due to the economic dissimilarities of countries. Depending on your location, you can reduce your software development costs by several times. For example, an hourly rate of a US web developer is somewhere between $100 and $150 whereas a work hour of a Western Europe-based developer with the same experience and skills costs about $35-50. The differences in living standards, however, do not necessarily reflect the levels of proficiency in different high-tech industries, like software development. Lower development costs are in no way connected to the lower quality of code. According to a report by SkillValue, developers from Eastern European countries are among the world’s best. Being a web outsourcing company and at the same time ranked among the top Ruby on Rails companies by Clutch.co, we can prove it.
How to estimate your costs upon starting your business by Paula Cruz [1]
#2 Diverse remote development engagement models
What’s beautiful about outsourcing web development is that it works for any business at any stage. If you have a startup idea focusing on building an MVP (Minimal Viable Product), it makes sense that your development team is relevant in size and involvement.
As for the mid-size businesses, we offer a versatile web outsourcing team of designers, developers, QA engineers run by a PM. The key feature is the adjustability of a team depending on the scalability of your business.
The premium engagement model is the ETM (Extended Team Model), where the outsourced development team becomes a department of your business with exclusive development services.
#3 Unlimited development talent pool
It can so happen that some large and complex web projects may require such high-level experts that simply aren’t there to be found in your location. The situation when it takes months to find a suitable candidate for the job is very common in the IT world. Think about the number of professionals reachable within your city. Now multiply that number by a hundred, because that’s the number of talented young and experienced specialists you can reach when hiring an outsourced team.
A survey made by the Manpower group claims that almost half of employers, especially in the US and Western Europe, struggle to find ‘skilled applicants’ in IT. Unlike your in-house team where you have to solve recruitment problems yourself and spend resources on team management, your outsourced team will pack itself with the best talent available on the market and run it to the advantage of the client.
Development by Uran [2]
#4 Competitive developers’ growth
With an in-house development team in question, it gets tricky whether it stays universally up-to-date and competitive. When it comes to engaging web and mobile applications, one thing about them is that they have to be sensitive to the market and trends of a year, season, or even within a hashtag.
Because of fiercer competition, an outsourced developer has no choice but to stay on the edge of modern technologies and trends in order to stay employed. Needless to say that the higher the outsourced developer’s skill set is, the better the quality of the products they deliver.
#5 Time-efficient development process
As an entrepreneur, you understand the value of timely delivery. The timing factor (that is, just the right time for your product to be released) is one of the major factors in a startup’s ability to succeed. The faster your product hits the market niche, the better. Are you ready to tolerate the mediocre time-efficiency when you and your product deserve better? With the number of days-off, national holidays, and all sorts of in-house teamwork stoppage days, your outsourced team will operate on a different schedule and will most likely be inclined to working full-time on your days off. It boosts the speed of product development and gives an edge of competition while maintaining the workflow without overtime work.
We’ll celebrate your Christmas (ours is on a different day) by keeping to build your product and presenting the results when you are back at the office.
Business Illustration Set Animation by Shakuro
#6 Multitude of development resources
For an outsourced team, the sky’s the limit in the sense of greater availability of resources and technologies. For example, the Ruby on Rails gems are distributed by open-source communities throughout the world, which multiplies the number of available libraries and solutions by thousands. The larger the network of your outsourced development teams is, the bigger ground of accessible technologies you cover.
#7 Easy paperwork and improved security
When rendering or benefiting from outsource web development services, both outsourced work parties are to be legally protected and the cooperation must be transparent both financially and in liabilities. We make sure our partnership is contractually safe and optimal. At the same time, there are no loopholes for schemes and hassle in case of disagreements and cancellations. As we strive for long-lasting commitments with our clients, these issues are not likely to happen in the first place, but a healthy no-strings-attached approach is indicative of outsourced development collaboration.
Another benefit closely connected to the legal aspect is that the outsource web development can give you far greater protection against the security leakages which is especially important for startups full of innovative market ideas. Choosing an outsourced development team, you can be sure that your project’s code, materials, and processes are kept confidential.
#8 Full-stack digital agencies
One significant advantage of full-stack development companies is that it can make life easier for a client by incorporating all kinds of web development services and solutions under one roof.
We packed our team with specialists in different fields to be as versatile as it gets. Early on we realized how important it is to establish a solid, vibrant team with its own signature style and culture within the company where each person adds their value to the project. We are proud to say that more than a decade of work has helped us build such a team. It allows us to be multifaceted and saves a lot of a client’s time. Once you outsource your development, your job would be to give feedback from time to time, and all other work areas, whether it’s design or web development, and all the adjacent hustle and bustle is our responsibility.
On the project by Ilona Rybak [3]
#9 Outsourced development flexibility
Having an in-house web development team means not only building a product but also maintaining and supporting it. However, the human and facility resources required for maintaining the web application are barely comparable to the resources of the development process itself. Do you dismiss half of your dedicated team? And what if your business requires scaling and expanding its functionality? Do you hire freelancers, or summon the entire team again?
Outsourcing web development is a solution. The flexible engagement models include shuffling employees according to the current state of the project, which saves resources and whenever there is a demand, is capable of expanding the team in peak periods within hours. To reach the best possible results with flexible planning, we apply modern and at the same time tested and tried Agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban that work great in any area though they’ve proved to be the most suitable in the IT industry.
#10 Room for improvement
So if skills and abilities are beyond quality argument and financial benefits are obvious, what are the risks and problems if any? In fact, there are quite a few, all of them being completely manageable:
- Communication and time zones. As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, with a number of tools available today, it’s really all about the infrastructure and language command. In our practice, we use a variety of design hand-off tools and time tracking software to make sure we have direct communication with our clients on all project levels.
As for the time zone difference, it can indeed be an obstacle sometimes and requires an additional level of planning and management, but at the same time, it can become your additional competitive advantage. Imagine a project you can get feedback on at any time of night without overpaying for it. With an outsource web development it can be achieved easily enough.
- Culture. Even though there are drastic cultural differences between East and West, global trends make their presence known and most of the best countries to outsource web development are sharing common values. Through constant interaction between the HQ and the outsourced web development team, you can broaden your perspective of the world and, perhaps, help you grow your audience internationally.
- Focus. By delegating your web development to an outsourced team, you can mitigate your head office business development process and guide their efforts to such important areas as sales and marketing. It is only possible with the strong technical backbone that a focused outsourced development team like ours is capable of providing.
So these are some insights into why to outsource web development and how your business can win by using it. In truth, there are no shortcuts in a successful business formation and it’s either a trial-and-error method, or a bold optimization approach that is achieved through efficient cost distribution, human resource management, time manipulation, and agility, all of them being constituents of an effective outsourced development model.
Guide to Project Management pt.2 by Maya Ealey [4]
How to outsource software development
Where do you go to find a dedicated development team to outsource your projects? There are some trusted unbiased resources that can save you a ton of time finding a team to hire. Clutch.co gives a clear perspective on agencies’ abilities, expertise, size, business model, and an extensive portfolio. On top of that, they provide honest third-party-mediated clients’ feedback that they extract using various methods including phone interviews. A bunch of other projects like GoodFirms that aggregate design and development outsourced companies deliver more or less the same set of services, so clearly there must be no problem finding a team.
Another question is whether something clicks when you first contact them. We appreciate every single message we get and respond immediately. Every opportunity is a potential long-term project and we strive to make it happen. We work exclusively as an outsourced team that requires no client-side management, as we run the company according to the highest standards and allow you to focus solely on your product.
So if you have a project (or an idea) and are thinking about outsourcing it, get in touch now and we’ll help you find the best ways to outsource web development and more.
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The article was originally published in March 2017 and was updated in July 2020 to make it more relevant and comprehensive.
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