A NZ SaaS Company's First Offshore Hire: What Worked and What Didn't

The Background

This Auckland-based SaaS company (60 employees, $5M ARR) had always hired locally. Their engineering team of 8 was tight-knit, and the founders were worried that offshore developers would disrupt the culture.

But the cost of local hiring was becoming unsustainable. They were paying $120,000+ for mid-level developers, and the market had gotten even more competitive post-COVID.

The Decision

They decided to try one offshore developer — a frontend developer to work on a new customer dashboard — before committing to anything larger.

"We wanted to test the model before we scaled it," their Head of Engineering told us. "One person, one project, 3 months. Then we'd decide."

The Early Stumbles

The first 4 weeks weren't perfect. Three things went wrong:

Timezone overlap was too thin. They'd scheduled standups at 3pm NZ time (1pm Philippines time), which worked — but ad-hoc questions took longer to resolve than they were used to.
Documentation was lacking. Their codebase had limited internal documentation, which made onboarding slower than expected.
Unclear ticket descriptions. The developer was waiting for clarification more than they should have been because tickets were written assuming local knowledge.

The Fixes

By week 5, they'd made three adjustments:

Moved standup to 9am NZ (7am Philippines) to give more overlap time in the morning
Created a proper onboarding wiki for the codebase
Added "acceptance criteria" to every ticket

After those changes, the developer's output doubled.

The Result After 3 Months

The dashboard project shipped on time. Code quality was reviewed by their senior engineer and passed without significant issues.

Total cost for 3 months: $8,400 NZD (vs. ~$35,000 NZD equivalent for a local contractor at the same level).

They've since hired 2 more developers through Lanex.

"The first month was rough, but that was mostly our fault — we hadn't prepared properly for a remote hire. Once we fixed our own processes, it worked really well." — Head of Engineering