The Nearshore Cafe

How a San Francisco Startup Cut Dev Costs 60% with LATAM Engineers | Nearshoring Success

• Brian Samson

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What happens when a Series B startup in San Francisco realizes they’re paying over $200K per year for a remote engineer—and getting no extra value from being in the Bay Area?

They go nearshore.
 And they win. Big.

In this episode of The Nearshore Cafe Podcast, host Brian Samson (Founder of Plugg Technologies) shares the true story of how one founder turned to LATAM developers to scale faster, cut costs, and build better—without sacrificing time zone alignment, communication, or talent quality.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  • Why hiring remotely in the U.S. no longer makes financial sense
  • How this CTO hired top-tier engineers in Argentina and Mexico—in just 48 hours
  • The real benefits of nearshoring over offshoring
  • How cost savings + faster delivery = competitive advantage in product development
  • What makes Plugg’s talent pipeline so effective for high-growth startups

If you're a founder, CTO, tech recruiter, or startup operator, this episode will reshape how you think about hiring, scaling, and building elite engineering teams.

#Nearshoring #LATAMDevelopers #RemoteHiring #StartupEngineeringTeams #OffshoreAlternatives #ArgentinaSoftwareDevelopers #MexicoEngineeringTalent #CostEfficientHiring #PluggTechnologies #NearshoreSoftwareEngineers #ScalingStartups #RemoteTeamManagement #ProductVelocity

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Speaker 0:

I am Brian Sampson, host of the Near Short Cafe podcast, and I'm also the founder of Plug Technologies, a staffing company that connects talent from all over Latin America to US companies. Today, I'd like to share a case study of how we worked with a Series B tech company right in San Francisco and move their business forward and all the attributes that came from that. So I want to go back to May of 2020. You guys remember this time period, right in the thick of COVID, where I'm wearing masks to go to the grocery store, no one's leaving their apartment or house. We're watching CNN all the day, all day, to find out what's going on with vaccines and all the scary news out there. But business went on. You know, it's one thing for this to be late March and business kind of paused. By May business was back, but it was all remote.

Speaker 0:

So I had a Series B company, the CTO and founder, co-founder of this company. They were pretty far along and he realized right away some arbitrage opportunity because he called me and said hey, Brian, I've got a guy in San Jose, california, and I'm paying him over a year to work from home. There's no more benefit of being together in the office. He was in the office, but now he's not and there's no end in sight. Surely, if I'm just going to have engineers work from their home office, I can get strong engineers for a better price point. Is this something I could get in Latin America? Big smile, I came over my face, of course.

Speaker 0:

So we had a talent pocket already of senior developers that met his hyper-specific tech stack. In this case they were in Argentina and Mexico and we went ahead and within two days had introduced him to a couple of these people. He was blown away in the interviews and I'll say that my buddy, he's tough, stanford CS degree and then a Berkeley degree, a master's in CS, so he knows his stuff. He's tough, high hiring bar. Blown away with the talent level. He ended up hiring two people that month from us, so he didn't need to spend massive dollars on Bay Area engineers anymore. He had huge cost savings, didn't lose a minute with workday overlap and, most importantly, he moved the needle on his business. These engineers got to work, made stuff happen, pushed the product forward and eventually they had a better product market fit. They were adding features quickly and he did this at a cost savings and he was very, very happy, so this is a reference account for Plug.