Scaling a FinTech Startup from MVP to 100K Users

1The Challenge

FinEdge launched out of Dubai in 2024 with a wallet app aimed at the UAE expat market. By the time the founders reached out, they had three engineers, a working MVP, and a Series A close that depended on hitting feature parity with two better funded competitors. Their CTO put it bluntly. He needed twelve engineers within sixty days, and the alternative was burning two of his three remaining months of runway on Dubai recruiters who could not promise more than five hires in that window. The local salary numbers also did not work. A senior React developer in Dubai was costing around 18,000 AED per month, which would eat their next round before the product even launched.

2The Engagement

We brought up a team of twelve in our Gurgaon office over a six week window. The mix was four React engineers for the customer app, three Node engineers for the wallet and ledger services, two QA engineers, two Android specialists for the bank integration work, and one DevOps engineer who owned the AWS environment. The team kept hours from 11am to 8pm IST so there were five hours of daily overlap with Dubai. The contract was a fixed monthly fee with no setup cost and a thirty day exit clause on both sides.

3The Solution

The first three weeks were spent on parallel onboarding rather than feature work. Each engineer paired with a Dubai counterpart for a week, walked the codebase, ran the staging environment locally, and shipped their first pull request before being assigned any real ticket. Standups happened twice a day, one async update in Slack at the start of the IST day and one fifteen minute video call when Dubai came online. Sprints were two weeks with a demo every other Thursday that the Dubai founders attended live. By week four the team was shipping eight to ten pull requests a day and the original three engineers had moved into tech lead roles, freeing the founders to focus on the funding round.

4The Outcome

FinEdge hit their original launch date with two weeks to spare and crossed one hundred thousand users in the first six months. The total cost of running the AllDomainSoft team came in at roughly forty percent of what equivalent Dubai hiring would have cost, which let them keep eight months of runway in reserve through launch. Eleven of the original twelve engineers stayed on the project past the eighteen month mark, which is well above the industry average for offshore teams. The team is now twenty one engineers and continues to operate out of our Gurgaon office.

5Headline Results