I have read approximately 8,000 essays about building software in India. Maybe ten of them have been useful to us. The rest are written by people in Bangalore, San Francisco, or Bangalore-via-San-Francisco, and assume that:
- The client has a CTO who reads Hacker News
- Internet bandwidth is fine everywhere
- Talent is available for the cost of one or two lakhs per month
- "Cloud-native" is a normal default
- The client's team can review your work asynchronously over Linear and Slack
None of these are reliably true outside metros. Here's what is actually true when you build for tier-2 clients.
Clients buy from people, not pitches
Our clients in Ballari, Davangere, and Hospet have almost never hired us through a website form. They hire us because we showed up at their office, took their problem seriously, came back two weeks later with a concrete plan, and didn't disappear when the project got hard. The CRM is a phone book. The sales cycle is dinners.
For a long time I thought this was charming and a little inefficient. Then I noticed something — these clients stay. We have clients we've worked with for eleven years. We've built three versions of the same college's website over a decade. That's not a sales cycle. That's a relationship.
Mobile-first is actually first
Our college clients see 85%+ mobile traffic. Some over 95%. Many of their users are on cheap Android phones with patchy 4G. Page weight matters in a way that it does not in San Francisco.
What this means concretely:
- Hero images are 60kb, not 600kb. We're not shipping a 4MB JPEG.
- Custom fonts are subsetted. Latin-only when there's no Indic content; Latin+Devanagari otherwise.
- JavaScript bundles cap at ~120kb for marketing sites.
- We build and test on a throttled 3G profile, not just our office WiFi.
Hosting reality
Vercel is wonderful. It is also irrelevant to most of our work. Our clients have:
- A cPanel shared hosting plan from BigRock or HostGator they bought five years ago
- Maybe an AWS Lightsail VPS if they're sophisticated
- An IT contractor who comes by twice a year
We build for that. Joomla on cPanel. Laravel on Lightsail. Static Next.js exports that drop into cPanel like any other site. We don't recommend infrastructure they can't maintain.
Payment integrations
Stripe is the default in most tech blogs. Stripe is also unavailable in India. We use Razorpay, PayU, or Cashfree. UPI is non-negotiable — about 60% of donations and small transactions go via UPI now. International cards (less than 5% in our experience for institutional clients) are an afterthought, not the default.
Hiring is hard, in a different way
In Bangalore the problem is salary inflation. In Ballari the problem is finding senior developers at all. We have solved this by being patient — we train, we promote internally, we hire one senior per year and grow them. Our average team tenure is over four years, which is unusual in this industry.
The flip side: every hire is a long-term decision. We can't fire-and-replace. So we are unusually careful about culture fit during hiring. This sounds soft until you realize the alternative is replacing a key engineer in a town where there are maybe twelve qualified candidates.
What I would tell a young dev shop
Build trust before you build software. Show up in person if you can. Charge fairly but don't compete on price. Pick a niche — for us it's institutional clients (colleges, government, mid-size businesses) — and become unignorably good at it. Don't chase metros. There's enough work in your own city if you're willing to do it well.
Sixteen years in, we are still here. Most agencies that started when we did are not.
Adyatech Team
Adyatech
