Ask IH: will B2B Dev work?

There is a very large number of companies across India doing precisely this. So you'd have a lot of competition.

You'd also have competition of companies in Eastern Europe doing the same thing.

US and European companies who have used development teams in India experience a number of difficulties.

• The cultural differences tend to be far larger than either party realizes. For example, customers often complain that they have to give instruction in an incredible degree of detail, or what they get back from the developers is useless. They assume they don't need to explain things that to them are "obvious". Meanwhile, I'm told that Indian developers complain that their customers can't provide a proper description of what they want.
• For longer projects, or long-term support relationships, Western companies find the level of staff churn common in India disconcerting. The nature of the market in India tends to mean that a small increase in the level of developer's experience creates an exponential increase in their employment opportunities. Western companies are generally unaccustomed to dealing with different people every six months.
• Where you might be deploying and maintaining a service for your customer, and where that service involves handling personal data (and that's as simple as collecting an email address on a "contact us" form), your customer is faced with legal issues around exporting these data to a jurisdiction that does not provide equivalent data protection. In the EU, the maximum fine for breaching Data Protection laws is €20 million (or 4% of global turnover, whichever is higher). This is increasingly making EU companies risk-averse where Data Protection is concerned. This makes Eastern European developers very attractive as, for example, Romania and Bulgaria have exactly the same Data Protection laws as the UK.

It is possible to be successful doing this, if you can deal with the various obstacles.

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