Hiring a remote developer can feel risky. In our experience, the real worry is rarely the missing face. It is not knowing where the project stands.

The fix is less about meeting more often and more about agreeing, before you sign, how you will communicate. These are the six things we would settle first.

1. Pick one channel

Chat, email and phone calls mixed together scatter decisions until nobody can find them. Choose one place and write every decision there. If something gets settled on a call, post a one-line summary afterwards.

2. Get a confirmation reply first

Ask the developer to restate your requirements in their own words before any work starts. This is the cheapest moment to catch a misunderstanding: a mismatch costs one reply now and a rebuild later.

3. Ask for a link you can click

A link you can open whenever you like beats a one-off screen share, because you can test it on your own time and show it to a colleague. Test data is fine at this stage. What matters is that progress is something you can touch, not a promise.

4. Check in weekly, in writing, on the same weekday

Three lines are enough: what got done, what is next, and what is blocked. A fixed weekday makes silence visible, which is often the first sign a project is slipping. We wrote up the other signals in 7 signs a project is slipping.

5. Put changes on paper

"Can it also do this?" in a chat thread is how scope and invoices drift apart. A one-page change request records what changes, what it costs and how it moves the schedule. Here is how to write a change request.

6. Close with acceptance items

Agree on what "done" means before the final payment, as a list both sides can tick. Otherwise the last stage turns into an argument about opinions. This acceptance checklist is a starting point.

Wrapping up

None of this needs special tooling. One channel, one written confirmation, one clickable link, one weekly note, one change form and one checklist will cover most of what an office visit was supposed to give you.

We are HS Solution, a small software studio in Korea that works remotely only. The full version of this guide is on our site.