Practical Ways to Succeed Using Offshore Software Development Talent

by | Nov 1, 2024

SaaS product startups are often created out of service businesses.

It’s rare for an experienced product builder to create a successful services business. But it happens.

Last year I interviewed three-time SaaS founder Matt Watson on my Practical Founders Podcast about his successful practical founder journeys.

Matt leveraged offshore software development talent in his last two SaaS companies to staff up quickly and grow efficiently.

His top developers and designers were offshore in the Philippines but weren’t one-off contractors or difficult-to-manage outsourced agencies.

He found an endless supply of top tech talent who became savvy members of his team, working hard every day to get things done fast.

So, for his fourth venture, Matt created Full Scale, one of the fastest-growing software development companies in any region.

Full Scale vets, employs, and supports over 300 professional developers, designers, and testers in the Philippines who augment and extend the core dev team of SaaS companies of all sizes.

As a long-time product and technical leader, Matt especially loves the offshore staff augmentation model:

“Offshoring development with staff augmentation is when you have a local resource that helps you run the product, and then you’ve got a lot of help offshore that helps execute on all of it.

“You can offshore all of it, but the perfect world is having your product and technical leadership in-house and then having a whole bunch of people around the world that help make it happen.

“Like my first software company where I was the CTO. We had software development, team leads, and architects. We just needed more people to get it all done. That’s where adding offshore resources works really, really well.”

Matt Watson, founder and CEO of Full Scale

There are many ways to staff your software dev team, and they all have risks and upsides.

Adding offshore dev staff to your core team is one of the most common and reliable for modern SaaS founders to build product efficiently.

In this expert session on my podcast, Matt shares what works and doesn’t work for practical SaaS founders who want to offshore some or all of their software development.

Matt also talks about creating a successful services business after so long creating product businesses. It’s a completely different game but can also be exciting and create a big impact.

Check out this informative interview with Matt Watson on the Practical Founders Podcast.

Greg Head posted this on LinkedIn on November 1, 2024.

Check out the comments and join the discussion on LinkedIn.

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