

Ask HN: moving company to Bangalore - striker44

Has anybody moved their company or based operations for a startup to Bangalore, India.<p>We are in Australia, and looking at costs for developers it looks like we can save significant money in developer costs.<p>We&#x27;d be looking at hiring 5 initially then. expanding the team to 20.<p>Does anybody have experience with this?
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stephenhacking
I run a startup in Bangalore and Chennai, so I can explain the costs involved:

In Bangalore

Your cost for 2000 square feet office space would be at least $2000/mo in a
fairly decent building; add to this 10 months rental advance which is $20k

Your cost for each developer would be between $1k - $2k - this of course
depends on the kind of work they'd need to do as well as how much experience
you're looking for in people. Do remember that almost everyone in India
expects a 10 - 20% raise every year. Senior level PHP folks will cost you
$1,500-ish considering the fact that freshers out of school get paid $600-ish
a month.

You'd also need to invest substantially in management staff in India because
it's very hard to get anything done unless you have a manager for every 4-5
people, unless you get really good self-motivated guys who'll cost you a bomb.
Managers will end up costing you $2k+

And, I forgot to mention - laws and the government are a bitch here.

I think you're just a few years late in jumping to the Bangalore bandwagon :)

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striker44
Why are laws and the government a bitch? How much would the self-motivated
guys cost? And why do you say that it's a bit late to be jumping on?

Cheers!

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stephenhacking
For starters, you'll need to start doing the following:

1\. Register a Pvt. Ltd. to do business <\-- hard to do unless you're Indian
or someone who's Indian on board 2\. Register with the RBI and get stamped
from them every time you remit money from outside India <\-- painful 3\. Not
be able to use a majority of payment gateways that collect payments in foreign
currency if you want to directly tie it to your Indian co. 4\. Process ESI if
you're paying under $400/mo 5\. Process PF if you're paying over $400/mo and
have more than 10 employees

It's paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork!

As for being late to the party, cost of labor has gone up at least 4 times in
the past 10 years and it's going to probably go up another 3 times in the next
five years. Smart people are no longer that easy to find and very few folks
actually are interested in working for startups. Cost of infrastructure,
electricity, broadband, everything is higher in Bangalore and more at par with
Austin or Boston tbh.

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hgarg
You would save on top developers. Not much on the office though. Better hire
remotely.

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aloha-my-boy
Developer qualifications ?

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striker44
top level senior developers, php sql jq etc..

