I’ve heard and read so many “here is how my offshoring went wrong” (or even just outsourcing locally), that I am really looking for successful examples and what one can learn from them.
For example, I currently have someone building a small raspberry pi program that takes RFID input, and posts the ID and date to our API. I want to demo this to some clients and if it's well received, we'll build it out fully.
I think offshore can be great for small projects like this, I have no experience with larger, longer off shore projects.
Buffer: https://buffer.com/about Automattic (parent of WordPress): https://automattic.com/about/
By the way, I am in Pakistan, not India :)
I would say there aren't so many examples of companies with heavily remote workforces thriving. As a founder, this was the subject of a lot of internal debate. I largely came to the same conclusion as a lot of companies: remote slows down execution, and execution is probably the single most important thing for a small company.
Also, this article discussed something different than building a remote team, and more in line with what most customers want: hire a mostly pre-made remote team all at once. The desired advantage is less cost savings and more speed. Building a remote team yourself is much more likely to work, but also probably slow enough that it's not worth it. You have to find a remote teach lead + hiring manager, work with him or her enough to trust him or her, and then empower that person to run hiring cycles.
The biggest problem we had is that when they had a problem, such as access or a backend system not working, they would not tell us until the standup. They would not email us so we could start working on it 5 hours before the standup.