What is nearshoring
The term nearshoring derives from ‘offshoring’ – in order to differentiate and highlight outsourcing proximity. Nearshoring is the process in which businesses delegate work to freelancers, agencies and companies that are nearby. “Nearby” is more in regards to time zone and cultural alignment than distance.
Nearshore outsourcing has become very common within the IT service industry. This works by businesses outsourcing large IT projects or revamps to agencies within a couple of hours of their time zone. A company’s IT team can work closely with a nearshore agency or fully delegate the project to them. This works particularly well in central Europe as there is a pool of talented IT agencies.
Building a network
We have been working with a nearshore talent for almost a decade. This has led to an intuitive knowledge of the talent we need to succeed in specific projects. Over the years we have built trusted relationships with our most reliable, experienced and deadline-driven nearshore freelancers. We have come to learn how to get the most out of these talented developers; how to manage their time, deadlines, and how to match them into compatible teams where necessary.
This has resulted in us accumulating a pool of talented, reliable and punctual developers, engineers and designers, all with specific talents that we can combine to create complete and comprehensive solutions for our clients. All of which is overseen by our technical producers and in house designers and developers, to ensure a pixel-perfect product for our clients.

The benefits of nearshoring
- Delegation to more specific specialities: Having collected a large pool of talent we can pick and choose micro-processes to delegate to different freelancers, with the knowledge of their expertise in previous projects.
- Skill specific: Sometimes it is more beneficial to get 3 experts in certain fields rather than a full stack developer. From our experience, we have created our highest quality products this way. By delegating individual processes to people we know to be experts in their field, we can provide a quality of the product far beyond most agencies.
- Time zone: Aligning workdays is one of the most valuable reasons to choose nearshoring vs offshoring. Being able to have conversations within working hours and organise meetings with external teams or stakeholders is essential.
- Cultural closeness: Your nearshore talent has similar working standards, processes and personality. This is particularly important when it comes to communication. All our nearshore talent speak fluent English but also understand the modern and ever-evolving lingo of the tech world.
- Quality infrastructure: This is both physical and educational. You do not want to be working with a remote freelancer with a bad internet connection. Our nearshore talent is from a variety of countries all of which provide an excellent standard of education, especially in regards to development.
- Diversification of skills: Although our agency only consists of 5 people, we bring to the table the skills of over 50 individuals, all of whom specialise in a specific technology stack or skill. This allows us to work on larger projects, be more creative in our designs and be more ambitious with our development.
Building a nearshore team
Nearshore teams can be composed of selective skilled workers. The size of the team may vary throughout the lifecycle of a project; being upscaled or downscaled depending on the current workload of processes. This flexibility makes nearshoring teams a unique tool, adding more power when needed and taking the foot off the gas at more drawn out stages of production. This results in a highly efficient and cost-effective workflow.
The ability to add team members is particularly useful for specific areas of expertise; for example, you might want to add SSR (server-side rendering) which increases page load times and improves SEO. This is a delicate task and can have varying degrees of effectiveness. In this scenario, we would get a specialist to contribute to the team for 4 – 5 hours; this would be their only contribution but would provide a far higher level of expertise and therefore quality for that specific task.

- We begin by evaluating the project, understanding and evaluating the different areas of expertise needed to provide the best result.
- Our technical producers, designers and in house developers build a strategic approach to the project, creating elaborative tasks and milestones.
- We select the talent we need to work on the project. We have an ever-expanding network of talent to choose from, resulting in getting the correct expertise for your particular projects/needs.
- We increase/decrease the team depending on the deadline, project size, processes and skills required at certain points of the development journey.
- Our in house developers work in tandem with our nearshore talent so that objectives, development and processes are constantly aligned and that quality and performance are ensured throughout.
- We ensure deadlines are met and expectàtions reached.
- QA is conducted by our in house team. For some larger or more complex projects we do both in house QA and outsource it to professional testers, to ensure a performative, responsive & optimized end product for our clients
Conclusion
We have over a decade of experience in working alongside nearshore talent. In this time we have used a variety of offshore and nearshore solutions. We are now at a point where we have created a perfect network of talent, capable of creating any technological solutions for your business. We have refined our nearshore talent to ensure perfection on every project, and the results speak for themselves. You outline what you want, we build the perfect team based on those requirements, then get to work.

With Vidar’s broad experience with design and usability, he is responsible for strategising the use of digital design within Studio Vi.