Insights · 5 min read
How a Chinese team ships software for Brazilian clients, including the billboard platform alooz.com.br. Timezone, language and the trust problem, solved.
By GGP Editorial
A lot of founders in Sao Paulo, Rio and Florianopolis tell me the same thing: they want to ship software, but a senior developer in Brazil costs more than they want to spend, and the good ones are already busy. So they look abroad, get a quote from an agency in India or Eastern Europe, and then worry about the eleven hour time difference and the language barrier.
We run the other direction on that. GlobeSoft is a Chinese software company, and one of the projects we are most proud of is a billboard and out-of-home ad design platform for a Brazilian client, alooz.com.br. It works because we treat the timezone and the language as problems to solve up front, not as excuses.
Brazil is one of the biggest software markets in Latin America, and demand for good developers there keeps outrunning supply. That gap is exactly what makes offshore development attractive, and exactly what makes a bad offshore experience expensive.
Brazil runs on UTC-3 most of the year, UTC-2 in summer. China runs on UTC+8. That is roughly an eleven hour gap. If you only communicate by email, you wait a full day for every answer and the project crawls.
The fix is to agree on overlap hours before the first sprint. We keep a window in the Sao Paulo morning, which is our evening, for daily standups, demos and decisions. A few hours of real-time contact each day is enough when the work in between is clear. Everything else goes through a dedicated chat group that both sides check at the start of their own day.
A typical day looks like this. Our engineers work through the China afternoon and evening. Around 8 or 9 am Sao Paulo time, the client joins a call, reviews the last 24 hours of work, and leaves comments. Our team stays on until the call ends, then finishes and hands back. By the time the client starts the next morning, the changes are done.
| Working pattern | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Overlap window | Sao Paulo morning, our evening, for calls and demos |
| Async handoff | Questions written at end of day, answered by next morning |
| Dedicated group | One chat with engineers, PM and the client, no email chains |
The payoff is real: your team ends its day, ours picks up the work, and you wake up to progress instead of a blocked ticket.
English covers the technical side, but Brazil is a Portuguese speaking market, and a lot of briefs, docs and user feedback come in Portuguese. We run the project group in English and Portuguese, so the client can describe a bug or a design change in their own language and nobody has to translate twice.
Trust is the harder part. An offshore vendor is a bet, and the only thing that pays it off is shipping something small early. We push for a working vertical slice in the first few weeks, not a long spec document. Once the client sees a real screen and a real workflow, the conversation changes from "will this work" to "what's next."
Alooz is a platform for designing and managing billboard and out-of-home advertising across Brazil. The interesting part was not the drawing tools. It was the workflow around them: who approves a design, which billboard it runs on, what the client sees before anything goes to print.
That project only worked because we asked those workflow questions in the overlap calls instead of assuming. A Chinese team that had never shipped for Brazil would have built the drawing tool and missed the approval flow entirely. The client already had the drawing tool in mind. What they needed help with was everything that happens after a design is saved, and that is what we spent the first weeks mapping out together.
It is also worth saying what the project was not. We did not need to know billboard advertising before we started. We needed to ask good questions and listen. That is why we take projects in any industry. The only thing we turn down is anything illegal.
If you are considering an offshore team for a Brazil facing product, check a few things before you sign:
The answers tell you more than any portfolio page. Most vendors can show you a nice website. Few can point to a Brazilian project that shipped, name the overlap window, and answer you in Portuguese.
Tell us what you are building and where you are today. We typically reply within 24 hours.
