5 benefits of nearshoring your web and mobile app development process

As the name suggests, nearshore outsourcing (or simply nearshoring) is the practice of developing all or part of a project in a nearby country.

In this article, we’d like to take a deeper dive into some of the benefits behind its popularity.

1. Your nearshore team will be close to you

As simple as it may seem, geographical proximity is one of the main appeals of nearshore outsourcing, specially when compared to offshoring. The reasons for this are many, but we’d like to focus on two of the main selling points:

Smaller time differences

This is one of the most well publicized advantages of nearshore outsourcing. To see why it’s such a big deal, let’s take a look at the drawbacks of a typical offshoring situation:

Let’s say your team is based off San Francisco and you decide to outsource to a popular offshore location: India. The time difference between you and your outsourced colleagues would be a daunting 13:30 hours. This means that, as you get ready to start your day at 8AM PST, your coworkers across the globe would be getting ready to end theirs at 9:30PM. This, of course, would lead to numerous disadvantages.

To start with, if a problem came up and you needed your offshore team’s help to solve it, you’d probably have to wait a whole day, since synchronous communication would be near impossible. The only solution to this would be asking your offshore team to work nights. This might initially seem like a good idea, as workers in countries where offshoring is common are often used to this. However, the health risks of working a night shift have been reported extensively, and workers following such a schedule often don’t perform to their fullest.

Moreover, time differences are an even bigger obstacle in modern working environments where regular meetings are an essential part of the working culture. Staples of agile methodologies, such as daily meetings, are hard to manage in situations like the one described above.

These weaknesses of offshore outsourcing are actually the strengths of nearshoring. Fundamentally, nearshoring involves manageable time differences, so this allows for fluid communication and all the meetings you could ask for, without jeopardizing your team’s health or performance.

Better flight connectivity

While modern technology has made it possible to carry out projects without ever meeting face-to-face, it is still good to know that, were it necessary, an in-person meeting could be easy to manage. Nearshoring allows just that.

Since nearshore teams are close by, flights are much shorter, and are also more widely available. This, combined with the short time differences we mentioned above, allow for short spontaneous visits to be productive, while not being greatly affected by jet-lag. Moreover, shorter flights tend to be less costly, so you don’t have to sacrifice your budget to visit your nearshore team.

2. Language and culture are not a big deal

While discussing the advantages of working with smaller time differences, we emphasized their effect on communication, and that’s because this is one of the pillars of any type of teamwork.

Even if you are sharing an office with your team, poor communication can often be the root of many problems, and this is what puts many people off outsourcing. The further your team is, the more obstacles will come up, and the harder you will have to work to make sure your project doesn’t get lost in translation. 

Fortunately, nearshore outsourcing offers a solution. While it is true that geographic proximity alone isn’t a guarantee for avoiding language and cultural differences, it sure can help mitigate them. 

This is because nearshore teams are more likely to have knowledge of your country’s culture and language. Furthermore, as a result of international commercial agreements and the growing popularity of nearshoring, nearshore teams are also likely to have worked with teams similar to yours (and thus likely to have learned from previous mishaps).

3. Nearshore teams can be close-knit teams

The two advantages we’ve listed above give way to a third, crucial benefit of nearshore outsourcing: it’s impact on teams.

Teams –and, more specifically, teamwork– are integral to making any development project work. The better the communication and relationships between team members, the smoother things will go. 

Unfortunately, even though we live in an era where synchronous long-distance communication is a reality, building and maintaining strong team relationships still gets increasingly harder with distance.

Luckily, the proximity of nearshore outsourcing manages to offset most of those difficulties. It does so by allowing for frequent communication (thanks to compatible time-zones) and by providing a bedrock of common understanding (thanks to the closer cultural and linguistic awareness mentioned above). These two pillars are key to supporting team relations, but they’re not the only way in which nearshoring helps to create strong teams.

As we’ve mentioned, the proximity of nearshore outsourcing makes it easier for teams to meet face to face. Even when there aren’t any specific issues that can’t be solved via emails and video calls, short in-person meetings can make a world of difference when it comes to building a strong, harmonious team.

4. Nearshoring will bring down your costs

Budgets are, perhaps, one of the main concerns in companies’ minds when they choose to outsource their project. 

At first glance, it might seem like the enterprise of a development project with a team miles away from your own would be more costly than handling things in-house. However, this is often not the case, since differences in hiring costs alone can have a huge influence on a budget.

In fact, companies looking to develop software often look to outsource to countries where living costs, and therefore labor, are less expensive. Not just that, but many other expenses related to running such a project (like utilities or rent) also tend to be lower in those locations. As a result, outsourcing ends up being the best solution, and nearshoring outsourcing in particular will combine this advantage with the ones we’ve mentioned before.

5. You will find yourself surrounded with new opportunities

Finally, nearshore outsourcing will open you up to a world of new possibilities. Once you’ve made the choice to take a leap and venture out of your own market, you’ll find that there are plenty of options for you to choose from.

Working with teams in other countries will expose you to new cultures, new ways of doing things, and overall new experiences you’ll learn from. It will also provide you with a whole new talent pool to help you build the best possible product and, if you’re lucky, it might even introduce you to new markets you may have otherwise never considered.

All in all, nearshore outsourcing offers plenty of enticing benefits. We’ve only focused on the 5 we deem more important, but we hope we’ve done enough to convince you to take the leap. 

If you’re ready to join this growing trend, book a time to talk to us and see if nearsourcing your web and mobile app development process is a good option for you