What kind of developer do I need?

3 points by xxshadmakuxx ↗ HN
Hello, I'm looking do develop what I would believe to be a web-based app. I do not possess the technical skills to create it myself so I'm kind of in the dark as to where to start and what kind of developer I'd even need. The Idea itself is not particularly new or groundbreaking, but I'd like to improve on what's out there. I'm looking to create a site that lets users input data, choose a "theme" or template, and create beautiful infographics based on the data inputted. The user could then further customize colors and logos and finally, give them the image format to download. Users would have the ability to store logos on the site for easy access to customization of future graphics even set up profiles with color preferences....what kind of developer would I need to accomplish this? How could I vet them and make sure they know their stuff? and what would it possibly cost to create something like this? Thank you for your help and experience.

3 comments

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I'm mostly going to comment on the latter part of your question about vetting a developer for this project.

As you mentioned you don't have the technical skills to create this project yourself, it would be quite difficult to be able to vet someone more reliably than random chance.

Obviously it would make sense for you to ask to see any related projects they've made, but I'd recommend having a technical friend help out with the vetting. Aside from past projects and their contribution to these projects, perhaps ask for a high level breakdown of how they would tackle this project. Have your technical friend to overlook this breakdown should weed out people who'd have little chance of delivering.

Hopefully others can chime in here, good luck!

If you have the money for it, I would suggest going with a service like ziptask or gun.io. They will do all the technical heavy lifting for you (figuring out requirements, vetting / hiring, project management, testing). You will likely spend around $15k-30k (very rough estimate) and have your app within 3-6 months. Then you will pay a couple hundred a month in server/bandwidth costs to keep the thing running.

Otherwise, you are looking for a "full-stack web developer". Though I would really suggest going with an agency for a project like this. Hiring and managing freelancers is hard.

If you do use a freelancer make sure you set up milestones and have it delivered and hosted and you get source code.