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When companies find product-market fit, the instinct is usually simple:

Hire.

More AEs.
More Customer Success.
More engineers.
More operations.

And historically, if you were building a technology company in San Francisco, you hired most of those people in San Francisco.

But there is another way to scale.

Apollo is one of the best examples I have personally seen.

Apollo didn't start with 100 nearshore hires

CloudTask had a front-row seat to part of Apollo's growth.

Back in 2016, Apollo started working with CloudTask with just five Customer Success reps.

One of those original five was Dave Menjura, who today is CloudTask's CRO.

Think about that.

Apollo did not decide overnight:

They started with five people.

They tested the model.

They saw whether the people could perform.

They learned how to manage a distributed team.

Then they scaled.

As Apollo grew and found product-market fit, that initial Customer Success team expanded into a much larger operation that eventually included Customer Success and Account Executives.

At one point, CloudTask had helped support 100+ people working with Apollo.

That progression matters more than almost anything else in this story.

Start with 5. Prove it works. Then scale to 50 or 100.

Now look at the economics

Let's run a simple example.

Imagine building a 100-person customer-facing team in San Francisco:

50 Account Executives
50 Customer Success Managers

If those employees average roughly $115,000 to $120,000 in base salary, you are looking at approximately:

$11M to $12M in annual base payroll.

Now compare that with building the same team with experienced professionals across Latin America.

Depending on country, seniority, English level, and experience, that same team could potentially cost roughly:

$2.5M to $4M annually.

That creates an estimated difference of:

$7M to $9M+ per year.

And that is before considering:

• Healthcare

• Payroll taxes

• Office space

• Equity

• Recruiting fees

• Other employee overhead

To be clear, I am not saying Apollo publicly reported saving $9 million.

This is a model showing what a similar 100-person hiring strategy could mean using today's compensation economics.

The exact number is not the point.

The operating leverage is.

This is not about replacing American workers

I think the "replace U.S. employees with cheaper international employees" narrative gets the strategy wrong.

The better model looks more like a barbell.

On one side:

High-leverage leadership

Founders.
Executives.
Senior GTM leaders.
Product leaders.
People who need to be close to capital, customers, strategy, and each other.

On the other:

Scalable execution

Customer Success.
Account Management.
Sales.
Engineering.
Support.
Operations.

Then something new gets added across the entire organization:

AI.

ChatGPT.
Claude.
Gemini.
Agents.
Automations.

Every person, regardless of geography, gets more leverage.

The model starts looking like this:

5 exceptional executives in San Francisco

50 exceptional operators across Latin America

AI across the entire company

That can create dramatically more operating capacity per dollar than simply putting 55 people into the same expensive office.

Product-market fit should change your hiring model

Before product-market fit, proximity can matter enormously.

You're experimenting.

You're changing direction constantly.

Everyone needs context.

Founders are still figuring out what customers actually want.

But after product-market fit, the problem changes.

You have something that works.

Now you need to execute it repeatedly.

More customers need onboarding.

More prospects need demos.

More accounts need managing.

More software needs building.

More tickets need resolving.

More operational work needs getting done.

At that point, requiring every incremental employee to live within 20 miles of San Francisco or New York can become an enormous tax on growth.

The lesson from Apollo isn't "Hire Nearshore"

It's much more useful than that.

Apollo's journey with CloudTask started with five CS reps.

One of them ultimately became our CRO.

The relationship then grew as Apollo grew.

That is exactly how I think companies should approach nearshore hiring.

Don't redesign your company overnight.

Don't move 100 jobs.

Don't fire your existing team.

Dip your toe in.

Pick one function.

Hire 3 to 5 exceptional people.

Give them real responsibility.

Measure performance against your U.S. team.

If it doesn't work, you've learned cheaply.

If it does work, now you have a playbook.

5 becomes 10.

10 becomes 25.

25 can become 100.

That is how nearshore becomes an operating advantage instead of a labor-arbitrage experiment.

Here's the question I'd ask every CEO

Look at the next 10 jobs you expect to open.

Then ask:

How many of those people genuinely need to live near headquarters?

Maybe it's three.

Put those three people close to leadership.

Pay them extremely well.

Then ask whether the other seven need to be in San Francisco...

or whether they simply need to be exceptional at their jobs, communicate well, work overlapping hours, and understand your customers.

That distinction could be worth millions of dollars as you scale.

And in the AI era, I think it becomes even more important.

Because the winning company may not be the one with the most employees.

It may be the company that combines:

Exceptional U.S. leadership

Exceptional nearshore talent

AI leverage everywhere

That's the operating model I'm watching.

Reply "BARBELL" and I'll model what your next 5, 10, or 25 hires could cost in the U.S. versus Latin America.

We’re not only hiring in LATAM

There is another part of this model that matters.

Some roles are worth paying U.S. market rates for because the talent is scarce, the role is highly strategic, or proximity to customers and leadership matters.

CloudTask is increasingly working on both sides of the barbell.

We are helping companies recruit some of the hardest-to-fill roles in the U.S., including:

• AI and ML Engineers

• Founding Engineers

• Solutions Architects

• Forward Deployed Engineers

• GTM Engineers

• Enterprise Account Executives

• VP Sales and CRO-level leaders

At the same time, we are seeing especially strong demand in Latin America for:

• Full-Stack and Backend Engineers

• Customer Success Managers

• Account Managers

• Account Executives

• SDRs and BDRs

• RevOps and GTM Automation talent

• Customer Support

• Operations

The strategy isn't U.S. or LATAM.

It's figuring out where each role should sit.

Pay aggressively for the handful of people who can disproportionately change the trajectory of the company.

Then build the execution capacity around them in the best talent markets available.

And give everyone AI.

If you're hiring right now, reply and tell me the hardest role on your team to fill.

U.S. or LATAM.

I'll tell you where I'd recruit it, what I think it should cost, and how I'd approach the search.

I read every reply.

Amir Reiter - Book time with me

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