Building a calm offshore development team as a solo founder.

Hook & context

This story starts where many bootstrapped founders find themselves: with more ideas than time, more work than they can personally ship, and not nearly enough cash to hire a local senior team. The obvious answer is to “go offshore”, but that phrase hides a lot of risk: timezone whiplash, vague contracts, low‑quality code, and the very real possibility of burning months of runway on the wrong people.

I didn't want an “agency relationship” where I was buying anonymous hours. I wanted people I could actually build with: a small team that knew the products, cared about the customers, and could grow with the business. This is the path from that first decision to what eventually became OffshoreDevelopment.dev.

Starting point

At the beginning I had a handful of small software products and services, a modest but real revenue base, and a clear bottleneck: everything technical still flowed through me. I could code, but I was also doing sales, product, and operations. That worked at a few thousand MRR; it didn't work when I wanted several projects to move at once.

Cash‑wise, I could afford a couple of good full‑time salaries in lower‑cost markets, or one mid‑level engineer in a high‑cost city. Hiring locally would have meant betting everything on a single person and a single culture fit. I wanted more redundancy and a bit of resilience, even if that meant trading off some convenience.

Key decisions

Decision 1: Hire for a long‑term generalist, not “just” task execution.

I wrote the first role around ownership instead of technologies: you ship features end‑to‑end, you own quality, and you participate in the roadmap. Tech stack was important, but secondary. This filtered out a lot of candidates who simply wanted Jira tickets, and it attracted folks who were curious about the product.

Decision 2: Pay above local market, below home market—and be explicit about it.

Many offshore arrangements quietly aim for the lowest possible rate. I went the other way: position the work as premium relative to local options, with clear expectations about responsibility and growth. This dramatically reduced churn. It also made the offer feel like a serious job, not gig work.

Decision 3: Start with a long trial that looks like the real job.

Instead of whiteboard interviews or contrived puzzles, I designed a four‑week paid trial around real tasks: bugs, small features, and one slightly ambiguous project. The goal was to see how candidates communicated, not just how they coded. The ones who asked good questions and wrote clear updates were almost always the right fit.

Systems & habits

A team is more than who you hire; it's the habits you keep. The operating system that emerged was deliberately lightweight:

• Weekly planning calls to set priorities and clarify scope, recorded for asynchronous review.
• Daily async check‑ins using a simple text format: yesterday, today, blocked.
• Written specs first for any feature bigger than a day, even if rough, to avoid hidden assumptions.
• Post‑launch reviews for anything significant: what surprised us, what to change next time.

None of this is complicated, but applied consistently it made the difference between “I have some freelancers” and “I have a team that knows how we work here.”

What broke & what changed

The biggest early mistake was underestimating how much context I was still hoarding. I'd assign work assuming people had seen all the previous decisions. They hadn't. This showed up as rework, frustrated messages, and code that technically matched the ticket but didn't solve the underlying problem.

The fix was boring: more documentation and slower ramp‑up. I started writing short “decision docs” for key product calls and used them as onboarding material. I also reduced the number of simultaneous projects so the team could internalize one product at a time.

I also made a few bad hires by prioritizing speed over fit. Unwinding those relationships was painful but taught me to treat offboarding as part of the playbook: clear feedback, short timelines, and a focus on stabilizing the team that stays.

Results & current state

Over time, the scattered gigs solidified into a small, stable team: a lead engineer, one mid‑level, and one part‑time QA, with design and specialist work pulled in as needed. Output became more predictable: fewer heroic sprints, more steady, boring progress across multiple projects.

The real win wasn't just “more code shipped”; it was mental space. With a reliable team, it became possible to treat new ideas as experiments instead of obligations. That's what unlocked the bandwidth to turn the hiring and management process into its own productized service.

Lessons & how it feeds Coterie

The core lesson is simple but easy to skip: offshore teams work when you treat them like a real team. That means fair compensation, clear expectations, and an operating system that doesn't depend on you being online 18 hours a day.

This story is the raw material behind the Coterie Playbook on hiring offshore developers. If you want the checklist version—with step‑by‑step process, trial project templates, and failure modes—that's where to go next.

You can also see how this team shows up across the rest of the Coterie projects on the Projects page.