1) Someone already has a pre-existing relationship (usually former work buddies) 2) The dev team works with other companies in the industry 3) Recommendation fr

1) Someone already has a pre-existing relationship (usually former work buddies) 2) The dev team works with other companies in the industry 3) Recommendation from someone in your network (often a VC or angel investor) all in that order. When choosing your off-shore dev team, you should be looking at communication, track record and skill in the particular technology/industry. In particular for communication, I look at how many hours of overlap do they have with my current work hours. Being from the East Coast I find India and New Zealand difficult to work with as at best I have an 1-2 hours of overlap (and often they may ask for two meetings, one in your morning and one in the late evening). Track record. Can you talk to some current and former clients who have had comparatively complex technology built? Are those clients happy, were the projects built on time, did they have any frustrations with the process, did they need a dev team to clean up the code? What was documented? One last thing to check for is the turnover rate (India can be especially bad). How often do they need to off-board/on-board new resources? I've had teams where every 3 months someone is going and someone is coming.