What is a digital agency? How did you get into it? 

A digital agency is similar to a traditional marketing or advertising agency, but with a firm focus on online and the inclusion of software development services, for example websites, mobile apps or online software portals. This places us on the right side of the global shift to technology-based marketing.I’ve had my own businesses for a number of years in marketing and software development. As the global marketing moved further into online, I consolidated my investments into AndMine. 

 

When there are lots of opportunities in India and other countries for offshore digital agency, why did you chose Nepal? 

I took a fortunate trip just over a decade with some friends from Melbourne University where I was studying at the time. I visited India and other countries also, looking for ways to reduce my growing software development requirements for clients in Melbourne. Even though it was a challenging time in Nepal, with the UN assisting in the path to a new democracy, I felt Nepal offered a unique opportunity. It was not saturating like India’s IT services, no massive investment driving the price up back then. But more importantly I felt the Nepali business culture was far warmer and trustworthy. In part because of avid interest in new investment, but also because the people I met were great to deal with, I felt this was a place we could really grow well.

 

What is your assessment of Nepal as a place for offshore destination for digital agency business?

In our space, software and website development, it is becoming more challenging with the cost of living rising rapidly in the last couple of years, this verses quality control and communication gap are things we work hard on. These aspects are testing the offshore model in overseas markets, with some companies opting to bring things back to Australia. However, we are very comfortable with the opportunity FDI provides and certainly keeps us looking at ways we can improve and expand our office in Kathmandu. 

 

What is your experience with Nepal’s laws on offshore investment? 

The laws are a smart move for Nepal. Opening up offshore investment will help grow the value for businesses like ours and I believe it will improve their quality of work in overseas market, and like-minded thinking, which is an ongoing challenge. 

 

How can Nepal gain better position as destination for offshore development? 

Nepal employees should be thinking how they can better integrate to the overseas businesses. We constantly train our employees on customer service, quality control and thinking ‘what would our Australian clients want?’ While these are not often answered well at the moment, just asking this question improves the long-term solutions and gets my team thinking more in line with the end-client expectations. English as a primary communication is another barrier we work to improve. Speaking only English in the office is an example of how the Nepal team can improve their marketability and consistency with overseas clients. 

 

What is your experience with Nepal’s labour market and power shortage? 

Pretty good actually. Strikes are always difficult for everyone, but we’ve put smart practices in place like switching days, working on a strike day or allowing walk to work on those days by changing up the hours in the day. We don’t require a lot of power and have good infrastructure like generators and inverters to ensure the team can work well during office hours. Internet speed is a problem, but it is getting better, once again we run buffers like three full time internet connections to ensure we have redundancy built into our systems. Labour wise, we need new staff often as we are growing rapidly, so we are constantly hiring - in fact, we have recently started our ‘always hiring’ policy. Really working in Nepal is all about good buffers and backups.

 

Do you have plans for extending your services to Nepali clients as well? 

Yes, we are starting to look at working directly with larger Nepali companies and the government, and offering the services, we know work well with our Australian clients, to them. We need more people in the team to achieve this, both in business and software development, and we are working towards that end.