Want to outsource web development? You might be searching for ways to cut costs or acquire new capabilities to stay competitive. After all, a recent Deloitte survey reveals that 79% of executives outsource app development. This includes startup MVPs and amazingly complex enterprise systems.
But there’s still that nagging feeling. I’ve heard so many horror stories from my clients and associates in the tech industry: misplaced trust, blown deadlines, and wasted budgets. Fortunately, there’s a way to prevent these risks.
Here’s my complete guide to outsourced web development.
Weigh all the pros and cons
There are many benefits of outsourcing web development:
- Vast product development experience. Reputed vendors don’t just give you access to a huge pool of replaceable outsourced developers. They’ve accumulated years’ worth of expertise in successful product launches. They assist with everything from market research to product strategy to UI/UX design.
- Time to focus on your priorities. All of us at some point wanted an extra couple of hours a day for all the tasks needing attention. Outsourcing buys you those extra hours. Some use it to free up the best engineers for a promising new project. Others focus on what they know the best—growing the business and client base.
- Easy team scaling. Hiring an outsourcing company allows you to get from an idea to a working product much faster than building a great team from the ground up. A tech partner can also quickly expand the team when needed.
- Long-term support. Companies like MindK strive to build lasting relationships with their clients. We often keep supporting projects for many years, with regular patches and improvements.
- Cost savings. According to 2024 Global Outsourcing Rates and Trends, companies save between 39% and 72% depending on the region.
Potential savings from outsourcing web development to various regions
Source: Accelerance
However, the benefits of outsourcing web app development also carry risks: unexpected costs, failed deadlines, poor quality, and the loss of control over the project. So, you need to know how to mitigate those risks and select the right tech partner.
Select a reliable web development partner
The success of your web project depends on the tech partner you decide to hire. Here are four essential tips to help make the right choice.
Find vendors with the expertise you need
Unless you already have a trusted company in mind, do your homework first. Start by googling and reading about companies that have projects in your niche or technologies. Use keywords related to your project, like “fintech web development services” or “outsource website development,” to shortlist potential candidates.
Read client reviews
When you have a list of promising vendors, investigate how past clients rate collaboration with each company. Clutch is an independent review platform. It provides extensive information about a company, including client reviews and ratings. Read client feedback to shorten the list of potential vendors and move on to the next stage.
If possible, talk to the vendor’s past clients
Even if the vendor only has 5-star reviews on Clutch, it’s still a good idea to reach out to their past clients. Find them on LinkedIn, send an email or set up a meeting to talk about their experience.
Assess their development process
Once you’ve picked some good candidates, set up a call to ask questions related to their development process. Ask how they manage projects. What procedures do they use for effective communication? How do they control the quality of deliveries? Do they provide support after the release, including updates and bug fixing?
In meetings like these, it’s important that you’re not the only one asking questions. When talking to founders who outsource web application development, I often hear the vendor’s ability to listen attentively and ask the right questions as a running theme.
Critical things to look for in a web development partner
Tick all the checkboxes on the list below to outsource to a reliable web development outsourcing company.
☑️ Reviews and case studies
Study the company’s website in detail ‒ make sure it contains case studies and feedback from previous clients.
CHOO, a SaaS platform for community management and education, developed by MindK [read the case study]
☑️ Experience with similar projects
Look for projects similar to yours in the company’s portfolio. This proves that the vendor has the right expertise to mitigate potential project risks. For instance, if you need to build medical software, you should cooperate with an outsourcer who has previous experience in this niche.
☑️ Knowledge of specific web technologies
When looking through company projects, pay attention to the technologies used. Ensure a chosen company has the expertise and skills in the programming language or framework needed for your app. At MindK, we have an extensive tech stack, including Node.js, React, and Angular.
The MindK tech stack
☑️ Excellent English skills
Interview developers and evaluate their English skills. Some engineers might have dozens of projects under their belt and fall short of conveying their thoughts and understanding your requirements.
That’s why we pay a lot of attention to the candidate’s soft skills during the hiring process. They continue to work on international projects, interacting with clients during daily meetings, Sprint planning, and application demos. This would’ve been impossible without regular English lessons and soft skills training.
☑️ Transparent pricing models
The chosen company should have clear pricing models without hidden costs appearing out of thin air. Although each agency has specific pricing offers, you should have to deal with only two pricing options:
- Fixed price – the full project cost is defined beforehand according to requirements that are unlikely to change.
- Time & material – you pay an hourly rate based on the work done and resources used.
You can check our detailed article to learn more about these pricing models. Whatever model you choose, make sure you’re on the same page as your tech partner.
☑️ Legally binding contracts
When outsourcing web development, don’t think only about milestones and tech stacks. You need a comprehensive agreement to govern relationships with a tech partner.
Such a contract should specify fees, intellectual property rights, liabilities, penalties, warranties, compensations, and more. This prevents any misunderstandings between parties.
☑️ Policies to protect confidential information
A reputable vendor should seal your business relationship with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). This document specifies information that is confidential and protects you in case of data breaches.
☑️ Flexible engagement options
Make sure your tech partner offers various engagement options to fit your requirements. Consider the project scope, your timeframes and budget requirements, existing capabilities and resources.
Another crucial factor is the level of control and personal involvement. Our article provides more information about specific engagement models, their advantages, and their drawbacks.
☑️ Clear communication system
To avoid hiccups, we recommend agreeing on a communication format before the start of the project. Discuss expected response times, update format, and their frequency. Make sure your outsourcing partner uses software like Slack and Jira to track the project’s progress, milestones, and deadlines.
☑️ Professional team
Ensure you’re hiring seasoned professionals rather than inexperienced juniors in need of training. A standard web development team consists of a Project Manager, front-end + backend developers, and QA engineers. You might also need a Business Analyst to assist with requirements, a DevOps engineer to implement automation, and a UI/UX designer.
At MindK, we have experience with a range of industries, including education, recruitment and HR, and energy management. Moreover, we’ve got certificates in business analysis (IIBA), project management (PMI), and technology (OpenJS Foundation, AWS, and more).
We’ve also recently become an AWS Select Services Partner.
Red flags to watch out for when outsourcing web development
Budget overruns, poor code quality, missed deadlines, misunderstandings, and failed launches can all stem from these issues. Watch out for these red flags if you want to outsource web app development.
❌Suspiciously low pricing
I know, it’s always tempting to go for the lowest bid. But remember, skilled engineers will never work for a company that pays pennies. You might also run into hidden fees and budget overruns, so it’s always a good idea to ask for a detailed breakdown of all project costs.
Check out our in-depth guide on web development costs for more detail.
❌Lack of transparency
In my experience as a client and a CEO of a tech company, I found two main factors that make outsourcing a success: transparency and care. Everything else is secondary. So, take note when the company is elusive about its processes, timelines, or pricing during negotiations.
This might be a sign of darker things to come.
Transparency is even more important later on. An outsourcing vendor should provide regular progress reports, status updates, and product demos. This allows you to understand what is going on with your project, how the budget is being spent, the difficulties that appear along the way, and when to expect results.
❌Communication issues
Miscommunication is one of the common root causes of failed projects. The team should work well together and be on the same page with the client. You shouldn’t be the only one to initiate communication with your outsourcing vendor or solely responsible for creating appointments, meetings, and checks.
You might fall in love with silver-tongued sales reps, but don’t hurry to sign a contract. It’s always a good idea to talk to the engineers first and ensure they have good English and aren’t afraid to speak up.
By the way, high soft skills requirements are one reason only 4 out of 100 qualified candidates pass MindK vetting. We also noticed that clients are much more satisfied when they can talk to engineers directly, which we encourage at every step.
❌Lack of proven expertise
Someone who claims to be an expert in web development but doesn’t have a portfolio of high-quality work is suspicious, to say the least. Even if all the relevant projects fall under a strict NDA, an experienced vendor will demonstrate a deep knowledge of your domain and key technologies.
❌High employee turnover
This may indicate that the vendor doesn’t treat employees well or that there are underlying issues within the company culture. When barely a month passes before an engineer leaves your project, this paints a grim picture of its success. Expensive onboarding, lost knowledge, and poor morale are some of the issues caused by high turnover.
That’s why top outsourcing companies pay a lot of attention to keeping their engineers happy. For example, MindK has a turnover rate of just 13%.
Traditional outsourcing vs staff augmentation: which option to choose?
Make sure your tech partner offers various engagement options to fit your project needs and requirements. To pick an optimal model, consider the project scope, timeframe, the budget you can spend, available resources, and the level of your personal involvement.
IT project outsourcing (managed services)
What it means: hire a well-coordinated team of specialists to cover all needs on a specific project. Such a project can be developing a new product, improving the existing one, or implementing a digital transformation.
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When to use: you have no in-house developers or want to focus on other projects and elements of company growth.
This was the case for one of the world’s leading Corporate Social Responsibility companies. 12 years ago, CEMAsys started a web development partnership with MindK. Since then, the remote team has become an integral part of the client’s business.
Team augmentation (outstaffing)
What it means: quickly fill specific positions with remote employees matched to your requirements. Retain full control over the project as there are no middlemen between developers and the client.
When to use: team augmentation is an ideal option for companies that already have an in-house team they need to quickly bolster with specific skills.
Here’s an example. Yokoy is a Swiss FinTech with over $100 million in funding. It needed an experienced DevOps engineer to facilitate the migration from GCP to Microsoft Azure. Such resources are hard to find locally. So Yokoy hired a MindK specialist for six months to re-create the infrastructure and automate deployments
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What to take care of at the beginning of the cooperation
#1 Sign a confidentiality agreement
The easiest and the most common way to mitigate security risks is to sign a confidentiality agreement. A signed agreement protects the information you disclose during negotiations, meetings or the development process, as well as any work relating to the product, its future versions, or development process.
#2 Develop a risk management plan
Almost every web development outsourcing company claims they know how to manage risks. But only those who have actual risk-mitigation mechanisms are really putting customer interests first.
While choosing your future partner, think about the problems you might face during the development of your product and ask the outsourcing vendor if they have faced similar problems and how they managed them.
Don’t forget to ask if they conduct a risk analysis for every project to identify and manage risks.
#3 Set up communication channels
Vendors that care about trust will always update clients and inform them about any project issues. At MindK, we prefer to add clients to daily project management tools such as Jira and Trello, to show the progress and status of each task.
Before a project begins, we develop and ratify a communication plan with our client. This plan outlines the most convenient means of communication, the stakeholders responsible for different tasks and stages of the project, and how often we need to hold meetings and provide demos.
#4 Assign an internal decision-maker for your project
As a business owner, you already have many responsibilities. They might distract you from the development process. So the assignment of a Product Owner from your side is recommended for the project, to communicate requirements and coordinate processes with the team.
#5 Don’t think you can outsource your brain, document your requirements thoroughly
Make sure that all your requirements are taken into account and documented thoroughly. High-quality documentation reduces labor intensity and the duration of your project’s development. Precise requirements allow developers to better assess the scope of work and budget accordingly.
#6 Get to know your team
It doesn’t matter if you are working with an in-house or an outsourcing team. For the whole project, you are one team.
Apart from online meetings, it will be good to meet with all team members in person or, at the very least, the project manager or business analyst. Personal meetings are required for long-term projects and dealing with complicated issues.
Since our company is focused on working with foreign customers, we frequently visit customer offices in the USA, Norway, and other countries. In the same vein, we invite clients to our R&D offices or set up meetings on neutral ground wherever convenient for the customer.
What happens next: how to ensure the success of your project?
There are two ways to start a project when you outsource web development services.
#1 Don’t have detailed requirements? Start with product discovery!
🕜Duration: up to 5 weeks
🧑💻Participants: Business Analyst, Software Architect, UI/UX designer, Product Manager.
Many clients have rather vague requirements when searching for an IT vendor. This can lead to all sorts of problems. Unrealistic expectations, lack of direction, frequent changes, missed deadlines, and exceeded budgets undermine even the greatest of ideas.
Fortunately, you can prevent these issues with a product discovery phase. It includes a series of workshops that help you define the product goals, uncover the deepest user needs, and set clear success metrics. More importantly, it can turn them into precise specifications for the future product.
📌Deliverables: Detailed cost estimate, user personas, product roadmap, high-fidelity wireframes or interactive prototype, solution specification.
#2 Know exactly what you want? Start with MVP development!
🕜Duration: 5 weeks – 1 year
🧑💻Participants: Project Manager, Business Analyst, Web Developers, QA Experts, UI/UX Designer (optional), DevOps Engineer (optional).
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is software with just enough features to delight early adopters and collect real feedback. This helps minimize risks, validate demand for your product, save costs, and secure future success.
📌Deliverables: fully-functional product, comprehensive test result reports, server setup.
Recruiting SaaS platform built by MindK [read the case study]
Follow the development process
A hands-off approach often leads to a product that doesn’t meet your expectations. Asking questions, providing feedback, and participating in the process can eliminate this risk. This way, you always have a clear picture of the product state and further steps required.
This rule applies to the agency. If they want to understand your business and build a valuable product, they should ask a lot of questions.
Prevent problems before they arise
In any working process, there are always conflicts and disputes in need of extinguishing. Here are some of the best practices in dispute management:
- Check whether your project manager keeps you informed about what is happening at every stage of product development.
- Make sure the agency has constant QA processes and regular code reviews.
- Be aware that if the agency actually makes a mistake, they should hold up their hands, explain the reasons, and suggest the recovery plan — demand all these things!
Take care of the product post-release
Finishing the development doesn’t always mean ending the collaboration. So make sure you keep the agency close at hand—you might try outsourcing web development services again in the future.
Meanwhile, check whether the code is well-documented and has been handed over to your internal team. If needed, ask about maintenance and support for your product.
Conclusion
Selecting a tech partner is not a decision to be made hastily. So take your time and double-check the information. Ask as many questions as necessary to ensure you outsource web development to a dependable and skilled company.
Feel free to drop us a line to discuss your ideas and see if MindK is a good fit.
