How a San Francisco Startup Cut Dev Costs 60% with LATAM Engineers | Nearshoring Success

WEBVTT
00:00:00.801 --> 00:00:13.880
I am Brian Sampson, host of the Near Short Cafe podcast, and I'm also the founder of Plug Technologies, a staffing company that connects talent from all over Latin America to US companies.
00:00:13.880 --> 00:00:27.039
Today, I'd like to share a case study of how we worked with a Series B tech company right in San Francisco and move their business forward and all the attributes that came from that.
00:00:27.039 --> 00:00:31.908
So I want to go back to May of 2020.
00:00:31.908 --> 00:00:41.862
You guys remember this time period, right in the thick of COVID, where I'm wearing masks to go to the grocery store, no one's leaving their apartment or house.
00:00:41.862 --> 00:00:50.408
We're watching CNN all the day, all day, to find out what's going on with vaccines and all the scary news out there.
00:00:50.408 --> 00:00:51.631
But business went on.
00:00:51.631 --> 00:00:56.246
You know, it's one thing for this to be late March and business kind of paused.
00:00:56.246 --> 00:00:59.414
By May business was back, but it was all remote.
00:00:59.799 --> 00:01:06.171
So I had a Series B company, the CTO and founder, co-founder of this company.
00:01:06.171 --> 00:01:23.254
They were pretty far along and he realized right away some arbitrage opportunity because he called me and said hey, Brian, I've got a guy in San Jose, california, and I'm paying him over a year to work from home.
00:01:23.254 --> 00:01:27.350
There's no more benefit of being together in the office.
00:01:27.350 --> 00:01:31.090
He was in the office, but now he's not and there's no end in sight.
00:01:31.090 --> 00:01:39.891
Surely, if I'm just going to have engineers work from their home office, I can get strong engineers for a better price point.
00:01:39.891 --> 00:01:42.159
Is this something I could get in Latin America?
00:01:42.159 --> 00:01:45.239
Big smile, I came over my face, of course.
00:01:45.620 --> 00:01:52.774
So we had a talent pocket already of senior developers that met his hyper-specific tech stack.
00:01:52.774 --> 00:02:02.332
In this case they were in Argentina and Mexico and we went ahead and within two days had introduced him to a couple of these people.
00:02:02.332 --> 00:02:14.225
He was blown away in the interviews and I'll say that my buddy, he's tough, stanford CS degree and then a Berkeley degree, a master's in CS, so he knows his stuff.
00:02:14.225 --> 00:02:16.665
He's tough, high hiring bar.
00:02:16.665 --> 00:02:19.391
Blown away with the talent level.
00:02:19.391 --> 00:02:29.042
He ended up hiring two people that month from us, so he didn't need to spend massive dollars on Bay Area engineers anymore.
00:02:29.042 --> 00:02:37.346
He had huge cost savings, didn't lose a minute with workday overlap and, most importantly, he moved the needle on his business.
00:02:37.346 --> 00:02:45.237
These engineers got to work, made stuff happen, pushed the product forward and eventually they had a better product market fit.
00:02:45.237 --> 00:02:53.707
They were adding features quickly and he did this at a cost savings and he was very, very happy, so this is a reference account for Plug.