Building software from a tier-two city

Every argument for moving a software company to Bangalore is about proximity — to talent, to customers, to money. Two of those three stopped being about distance some time ago.

What you lose

Hiring is genuinely harder. There is no pool of engineers who have already shipped something at scale, so you train people or you do it yourself. Investors are unlikely to drop in. Neither of those is fatal; both are real.

What you gain

You are surrounded by the customer. The distributor two streets away runs on WhatsApp. So does the clinic, the parts supplier, the wholesaler. When the people you are building for are your neighbours, the feedback loop is measured in hours and costs nothing.

• Cheaper to run, so the runway is longer for the same money
• Problems arrive from real businesses rather than from a deck
• Support in the same timezone and the same languages as the customer