I run a software company in Islamabad and most of our clients are abroad: Australia, the United States, Canada, South Africa. Over five years I have watched businesses hire well and hire badly from Pakistan, and the difference was never the hourly rate. It was the checks they did in the first two weeks.
This is the checklist I would give a friend in Sydney or Toronto who asked me how to do it.
1. Look at shipped work, not profiles
A profile tells you what someone says. A live product tells you what they finished. Ask for three things that are actually online, and then use them: open the site on your phone, place a test order, look at how it handles an error. If the developer has a company site, read their case studies and check whether the numbers in them are the same as the numbers on the client's own site.
On our side, we publish the portfolio on devkeytech.com and write up the lessons on the case-studies page. If a developer cannot point to anything live, treat that as the answer.
2. Speak to one reference, and ask one question
You do not need five references. One honest conversation is enough if you ask the right question: "What went wrong, and how did they handle it?" Every project has a bad week. A reference who says "nothing went wrong" was not paying attention; a reference who describes a problem and a sensible fix is telling you what you need to know.
3. Start with a paid trial scope
Never start with the whole project. Pick a piece that takes one to two weeks, pay for it at the normal rate, and treat it as the interview. You learn how they ask questions, how they estimate, whether the demo matches the promise, and how they write. We insist on this ourselves; it protects both sides.
4. Get the contract right
Four things belong in writing before any real work starts:
- IP assignment. All code and designs belong to you. Not "licensed", assigned.
- Confidentiality. An NDA or a confidentiality clause in the services agreement.
- Scope and change control. What is included, and that changes are quoted before they are built.
- Exit. How either side can stop, and what gets handed over when they do.
Keep the code in your GitHub or GitLab organisation from day one. If the developer owns the repository, you have a problem the moment the relationship ends.
5. Agree how payments work
International bank transfer, Wise and Payoneer all work from Australia, the US, the UK and Canada to Pakistan. Decide the currency, the milestone schedule and what triggers each payment (a demo you have accepted, not a date on a calendar). US clients usually ask the vendor for a W-8BEN-E form for their records; any established company can provide one.
6. Decide how the time zone will be used
Islamabad is UTC+5. For Australia that means your afternoon is our morning. For the UK it is most of your day. For the US it is your morning and our evening. None of these are a problem if you decide up front when the live call happens and accept that everything else is written. The worst outsourcing relationships I have seen are the ones that tried to run on calls at odd hours for both sides.
We publish the exact overlap for each country on the hire-by-country pages.
7. Ask who actually does the work
Agencies sometimes sell you a senior person and staff the project with juniors. Ask directly: who will write the code, and will I talk to them? At DevKey we are a small senior team and the answer is yes, you will.
What this looks like in practice
A typical first month with a client abroad: an intro call, a written list of questions, a one-to-two-week paid trial, a demo, then a fixed-scope proposal for the real project with milestones. If the trial goes badly, you have lost two weeks and a small invoice. If it goes well, you have a team.
If you want to try it, the contact page is the starting point, or message me on WhatsApp.