What Makes Portugal so Attractive to Foreign Startups?
Tech Talent is one of the most sought resources nowadays, and Portugal is a world-wide renowned tech hub. In fact, it has been the nest for some high-tech innovations that changed the world we live in today. That is why many foreign companies turn to Portugal to carry out their tech and digital projects.
There is a local player that has helped many startups and corporations create digital products with lasting impact, by bringing a truly agile approach to product innovation and software development: for our series of interviews, today we spoke with André Rodrigues Lopes, founder of Altar.io.
The company goes beyond providing a standard IT service. It acts as a partner that challenges clients' product decisions to help them achieve greater results.
BRIDGE IN: What makes Portugal so attractive to startups?
André: It all comes down to a single word: Charisma. Lisbon and Portugal as a whole have been growing a lot over the last 5-6 years. The fact that Lisbon especially has become a destination for all kinds of aspiring entrepreneurs and startups at that time. Web Summit’s 4th Portuguese edition has just come to an end and isn’t leaving for another 9 years.
Portugal is now known for its great workforce in terms of both hard and soft skills. The talent here is known for flexibility in terms of work requirements. That’s why global companies are flocking here because they’ve seen the talent Portugal has to offer and know it’s crucial for their own success.
Overall, right now when Portugal shows up on the news it does so for good reasons. It’s a country that all of a sudden started winning. Lot’s of Tourism Oscars, the Euro football championship. It’s the country of Ronaldo, Californian weather, the surf season is incredibly long, it’s got three home-born startup unicorns (Talkdesk, Outsystems and Farfetch) and last but not least it’s considered the third safest country on earth, after the remote island nations of Iceland and New Zealand.
It’s hard to pinpoint just one factor that makes Portugal attractive, it’s a culmination of everything.
BRIDGE IN: What about you André, what is your background and when did you decide to launch Altar.io?
André: I graduated in 2008, I worked in commercial real estate for the next four years. 2012 was horrible. We were at the height of the southern debt crisis. No one wanted to touch Portugal.
I decided to launch a startup called Table & Friends – a social restaurant reservation system where you could book restaurants, invite friends, accept invitations and get a discount.
Then in 2014, I moved to the Philippines as a product manager for a year. In 2015 my co-founder Daniel challenged me to launch Altar.io as a product house.
In the beginning, we focused mostly on product and less on having our own development teams. Since then, we’ve been concentrating on both product and development, and, more recently, this branch of dedicated teams/nearshoring.
This progression in the company has occurred because our clients’ needs evolve over time, and we’ve moved with that to remain part of the process at all stages of their early-stage startup.
When our clients first come to us, they’re usually looking to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). They’re building it to transform a business idea into an application, get a product in the hands of users, as well as having something to show investors to help them raise capital.
The second stage is continuous development. Our team constantly launches new features to iterate and improve the product.
Finally, what happens is, these companies need a dedicated team. We provide that to founders. So we take a small part of our team or hire a few crucial, additional team members and they work full time on our clients’ project.
This is an interesting concept. There are many advantages to this, for both our clients and our developers.
Our clients, whose expertise is in their business vision, have access to our product and tech specialists for their companies.
Our developers get to work in a wide range of industries and experiences – while staying in a company (Altar.io) that is the best learning ground for key technologies such as Angular, Node or Graph QL to name a few.
BRIDGE IN: Let’s cross some t’s and dot some i’s - what are the differences between Nearshoring, Offshoring & Outsourcing?
André: The differences between nearshoring & offshoring is geographic, mainly.
Nearshoring is where the client is geographically closer to the company. Meaning there are fewer cultural differences, less likelihood of communication barriers – to name two.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is where the client is farther away from the company. Here, the risk is that there are language barriers, time zones become an issue, a culture clash is more likely.
Then outsourcing is a different model entirely. Where you have a large team of people and when there’s a job you call them and you ship them out to a client’s office – and that’s where they stay until it’s time for them to move to another company.
We don’t do outsourcing in Altar.io. What we do is we have people in our office working on client projects but in our mindset, with our values, with our frameworks & training, everything we do. So they’re not just bodies being pushed around to the next job. Although this is technically nearshoring I don’t like using that phrase. It’s synonymous with outsourcing and offshoring and carries big generalist consulting connotations while we are a tight-knit boutique specialist company.
The term I prefer to use is “Dedicated Team”. We use this term because they’re trained with our Values and Culture. It’s a transition, they’ve been part of the MVP process with that project, they’ve been there since day zero, they’re invested in the product so it makes complete sense for them to become part of that client’s team. And as they’re working in our offices as part of that micro team they’re surrounded by specialists working on other projects, they’re able to bounce ideas off each other in a tech environment.
This also means our people have this notion of being Altar. Being humble, proactive, dynamic, with a can-do attitude. Rarely we have someone come into the company who isn’t aligned with that culture. But when that happens, it doesn’t erode the culture of the other members of the team.
These core values are very present, the fact our clients recommend us and continue to work with us is a great testament to that culture. It’s the invisible vote of confidence.
BRIDGE IN: It makes total sense, you work as an extension of your clients’ team without losing your identity and the power you have to contribute to your clients’ projects
André: Exactly, we care deeply about the success of the products we work on from ideations to launch. If we didn’t, our business model would be very different.
BRIDGE IN: What do your international clients look for when they come to Altar.io?
André: They definitely know about the cost-effectiveness of tech skills in Portugal so that is definitely one of the reasons why they contact us. We are then able to retain them because we show that we care about the product by being very proactive. We’re always thinking about the perfect product-market fit for our clients, as an example. Lastly, the execution of the product, the technical quality and the cutting edge technologies we use results in lots of efficiency gains for our clients.
We’ve become known for this and our clients keep recommending us to new founders looking for development. We’re also big contributors in the Open Source space. We create a lot of Open Source projects and write about them. One of the projects we focus on is Angular, for example, which is one of the most sought after technologies right now. This is due to a recent increase in frontend development complexity, while backend complexity is decreasing.
Our Angular Open Source project has 50–60k downloads per month and before COVID, we were hosting workshops with 50-60 participants on the new versions of Angular in Lisbon.
Again, it goes back to how popular Portugal has become in recent years. Founders are seeing that they can get the same level of quality as they would from the UK or US at a fraction of the cost. That’s all thanks to the abundance of great talent here.
Are you curious to know all the reasons why many international companies choose Portugal to support their European operations? Download our ebook and get an overview of why Portugal is great country to set up a company, and step by step guide on how to register your business here.
