

As an expanding staffing model, staff augmentation can have strong positive impacts on startups.
Today we’re going to take a look at a handful of these distinctive benefits that staff augmentation can have for businesses that are just getting off the ground.
Lower costs of development
As startups are generally short on expendable cash, staff augmentation can keep costs down by working with nearshore partners. Perhaps you need to extend your existing team with a pair of highly talented software developers, yet attempting to bring them in makes you realize the high costs involved. Staff augmentation provides realistic solutions.
Quicker to market
A lot of time can be saved through staff augmentation; time that would typically be spent on searching, recruiting, and hiring full-time employees. Augmenting staff can help accelerate this process to make sure that you can deliver quicker time-to-value.
If there are projects or tasks that have tight deadlines or a fixed process, then getting the right people in place in a quicker time frame is ideal.
High quality
With so many digital technologies available, the skill set for projects can – and often are – very specific. For example, ecommerce stores will require workers with skills and experience in ecommerce platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, or Magento.
Finding such specific talent could take months, yet with staff augmentation, it gives you access to sought after skills, ensuring you can deliver quality products.
Flexibility
Despite different time zones being considered a negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an obstacle. In fact, it may even work to your advantage. If, during the lifetime of a project, you come across bumps in the road, and if they are met late during the working day in the US, they can be ironed out faster with augmented staff than with local developers.
Access to global talent
There are regions of the world that are buzzing with talent and tend to fly under the radar. For example in Argentina, there are around 134,000 Argentine developers, as well as 20,000 graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Some examples
There are plenty of well-known global brands and companies that you can point to and say “Did you know that they began as startups?”
Brands and companies such as Alibaba, Slack, Skype, and Github are huge, household names now, yet they launched as startups. But not only that, they began as startups that used augmented staff.
Popular messaging app WhatsApp – which was founded in 2009 before being bought by Facebook – is actually mostly developed in Eastern Europe as well as the core of the customer service being outsourced to Eastern Europe.
If you are a startup, then hopefully this small chunk of information can go some way into helping you progress down the right path for your business!