[guyromm]

as you've witnessed, this approach, when applied well, has advantages, but also suffers from increased communication overhead and roundtrip times. as a result, prototyping and researching open-ended, not well defined assignments is not ideal with remote, given that the required feedback loop between customer and executor (you) is better kept short. maybe it would be best to enjoy both worlds? say, once you've onboarded the customer and are delivering, begin reducing costs for them by delegating units of work to cheaper, remote resources yourself? this way the customer is happy and stays with you. this has the added benefit of freeing your own time to take on new work.