No, unless you have experience managing them. You may end up wasting money and time and getting nothing. I heard cases when people do not even get the source code.
in my previous team, our founder was not technical. she hired an experienced freelancer (they had a history of projects together) then that freelancer managed her team/ hire process.
take away from this
1. hire a developer you can trust.
2. he can build a team
3. don't use Node for backed (my personal opinion)
4. keep an eye on how much everyone is getting paid.
if you need help hit me up at akshay.deep0{at}gmail.com
It could be, if you do it right. As a former freelancer and now consultancy owner, I suggest you to:
1. Avoid cheap freelancers.
2. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions.
3. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it.
4. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers.
I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.
adding on to this, it is important when you draft the wireframe that you think through all possible paths that a user can take through the MVP and whether any application state is maintained between user actions. Those should be noted in the wireframe.
Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.
In my experience, the expensive freelancers can be even worse than the cheap ones. They often take a well padded amount so they could outsource it to someone cheap.
Here is an anecdote that maybe others can relate to:
We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users.
The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time.
The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience.
The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it.
Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied.
This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
I take it you have a UX person on the team? Otherwise I feel bad for your company if you are using a UI designer in place of well thought out UX. No amount of pretty can fix a serious workflow issue.
Here's another anecdote about using freelancers for this: When I wanted a logo for studyswami.com, I went to fiverr (or something similar) and asked several different designers for a logo. With all of these logos in hand, I brought them to a group of people who shared what they liked and didn't like about each one.
After a bit I had a decent idea, and hired an expensive designer and gave her a clear idea of what I wanted. She then did a brilliant job, producing three or four outstanding logos. I think the logo I chose is one of the best out there anywhere.
The problem with the expensive designers is that they are hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody, yet is a big part of your cost. They usually give you a limited number of designs- like 3 or 4- to choose from, and you're 'stuck' in that circle of thinking.
So if you can clarify what you want for cheap you'll better use the talent of the experts, IMHO.
And the expensive designers are better skilled to make it part of a branding system, consider issues like scalability from logos to tradeshow backdrops, etc. But, yeah, in many cases they can spend a lot of time developing concepts that are an immediate "No" from your perspective.
>hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody
That's as good a way of putting it as any. Maybe they're better at thinking "outside the box" than someone within the company or off the street. But that hasn't really been my experience working with branding and design firms--especially if you already have at least some idea of the direction you'd like to take things.
Yes, there are sites geared towards getting proposals first, with designers that are fine with that free work with the possibility of landing a contract.
This would have replaced your fiverr exploration and gotten to the same result of using any designer more effectively.
I'm not sure studyswami is that great of a logo though.
First, it has too much detail going on. Should just reduce the number of green pages to one on each side, and increase the overall sizing. You should be able to make out all the details of a logo, 50px50px, from a distance of 24" from the monitor.
Second, all good logos work in a square-based format. Study Swami is closer to a rectangle. Perhaps trimming the overall size left/right would be better, the overall theme of it is good
Third, I think the center black line on the person is distracting. It doesn't really add value in my opinion, and both blue lines should be joined
Fourth, the color schema does evoke trust (blue and green), but I think a color gradient schema from top to bottom might work slightly better (perhaps teal, book pages uptop are lighter shade, book pages bottom are darker). Use of some shadows might elicit better effects
Fifth, I think the person should be a completely seperate color than the book, but that's just my opinion
Sixth, the curvature on the person could use some slight improvements with golden ratios. I think the person's arms should be going up not down, but again personal opinion
Seventh, I think the site overall, the text ligature and font-family should be something simpler like calibiri or Arial
As a side note you do make good points though. Personally, I am not a great logo designer I just use 99designs.com, and modify the end result in .AI if I need too.
You can usually find great logos and portfolio templates from designers, but you need a strong creative vision and design aesthetic regardless
I hope nobody takes this comment seriously. I don’t know a single good designer who uses a template for anything. They may draw inspiration from samples provided by the client but definitely no templates.
If you hire an enterprise firm who fails do deliver a product that fits your target market then the fault is on you for not doing your due diligence.
Contests are by far the worst way to go about making a design decision. You are asking a bunch of people to design something they put little thought into so they can make a big impression with little tact. Might be ok if you are doing a shitty logo but for a project that requires understanding your target audience you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
1/ On your side, you need to make sure you know what you want (at the very least the big picture)with a rough idea on priorities and communicate it to your contractors well. Reserve some time for questions on their side and be generally open. In return, listen to their technical feedback and take it on account when weighting on decisions. After all, you hired them because they have some level of technical expertise that you don't have.
2/ On their side, your contractors must be comfortable with showing their progress on a regular basis. This is tremendously important so you can see how things are moving, catch problems before they arise and overall steer the whole ship if need be. It is also really important that they are able to explain what they are doing and why do they do it in this order as after all they are working for you.
Finding this balance will essentially make sure the contractors have what they need to fill your expectations while making sure on your side you actually have what you are paying for.
The worst part about being non-technical is that you can't really tell who is good and who isn't.
I'd recommend getting a technical founder on board, at a very generous share. The product will also need to be pivoted and iterated on a lot. With a freelancer, they might disappear with a halfway done job.
Ideally register the company when there's something to show. Even if the company has been registered, this is where vesting kicks in. Agreed that it's probably harder to fire one, and worst case, you might have to abandon the company and start a new one.
I know that most people won't build things for "equity" but it is a form of investment for the technical co-founder. That said, a lot do take salary as well as equity, and it's a balance between which they prefer.
There are some benefits - like being easier to gain investor confidence, if you do have a technical founder. I think that makes it worth it.
There are companies that you can outsource the entire development to. They will do the project management, find the developers with right skillset, etc.
If you understand tech well enough that you can spar with them then yes.
I have built several products with freelancers. My primary area is design but I understand technology well enough that I can help solve potential problems I can even code a little (mostly php, javascript and scripting like css and html) I can also look at lover level languages like objective c code and understand kind of what is going on.
If you are building something technically complex I would say you are much better of finding at tech-co-founder or at least have some friends in the tech business you get advice from.
If you are building simpler things then you should be fine with just running it yourself.
As a former freelancer myself: here's what i hate about clients:
1. Know what you need. Don't go to a freelancer assuming he understands, or cares, about your product as much as you do.
2. Be clear on every single functionality about what you need. If there's something you did not define, the freelancer will mostly always choose the easiest to implement and probably most unwanted option
3. Have a wireframe. Always use a wireframing tool to make a "flow" of how your app will work. If you can't use mock up tools, use powerpoint, but please have something ready
4. There is nothing like a cheap, or expensive freelancer. It's mostly all experience and knowledge. What you want is someone who can make what you need, and has done similar work before. A good question to test out someone's basic tech knowledge is to ask them if they know the difference between, hashing, encoding and encryption.
Totally disagree with you. What you're describing is a code monkey, in which case it's a commodity and a race to the bottom.
A "freelancer" that charges top rates will give you all that you say the client should have come up with: they'll sit down with the client, understand where they're coming from and why they're building what they're building, and come up with a complete solution, not just code.
As a freelancer you'll also land much better clients with that approach.
1. Hire a technical auditor: someone who can set standards before the project starts and checks that the freelancers are sticking to them. This can be a more expensive engineer but you pay for less hours.
2. Split your project into weekly/bi-weekly deliverables that are useful to your users as standalone features (lookup INVEST in the context of Agile)
3. Have all code be checked in to your Github account
4. Have your auditor check each deliverable to make sure it complies with the standards defined before the project
Writing from a phone so couldn’t add more details. If you have questions I’ll elaborate here.
You are going to get a system based on the architectural opinions of someone else. There is no way around that. Even in the comments already posted here, the advice is sprinkled with opinions that may or may not be correct for you.
So it all comes down to working with someone you can trust. Whether that is an individual freelancer, someone you hire to run the freelancers, or outsourcing it all to a firm... you need to put your trust in them. If you have a good way to vet whomever that is, sure, it can work. But if you don't even have enough tech knowledge to do that vetting, I would recommend against using freelancers.
Remember the M (Minimum) in MVP. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to show you, your customers and your investors that you have given some though to how your product will work in practice.
Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.
Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].
Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.
And it's scalable. I built https://newslines.org with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views in one day. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).
I recently had a house built, which exposed me to a dozen general contractors (people/companies referred to as builders). Not a single one of these small shops had a carpenter on staff. They were all basically project managers that subcontract all labor and earn their fee by adding 20% to however much is spent.
I wouldn't call GC's non-technical. They know all of the pieces that it takes to get the thing built and the community of construction workers have multiple general skill-sets. The best part about your GC might be that he knows how to hire the right people.
I agree with the first part, but your second example is pretty much exactly how the residential construction process works (and likely the commercial sector as well, but I have no direct experience there). The general contractor hires local subcontractors (roofers, electricians, plumbers, rough carpentry, finish carpentry, drywall/plasterers, painters, tilers, etc), manages the overall project timeline and budget, and pays the subs.
Bringing it back to OP's question, the comparison might be: many companies use technology (have a website, maybe even sell online) but are not technology companies at their core. Other companies that seem tech-light might have amazingly deep tech underlying the business.
If OP is founding a company that is going to happen to sell some things on a Shopify site, or create some gadget that has a few blinky lights on it, it could be perfectly reasonable to outsource the tech. (100% agree that if there's deep tech involved, that you need a tech-savvy founder or an amazingly committed tech advisor at a bare minimum.)
I would invest a few days or weeks and write a detailed and precision spec. Then you can work with freelancers. The biggest risk is scope creep because it sours relationships quickly. If you invest the time to write a spec, there is far less risk. A spec is a narrative and a list of specific screens and functions. I have run a dev shop for 10 years and can help you with a spec if you're interested.
There are “studios” that have been setup inside a few accelerators that would be the only way I’d do this. They aren’t cheap, but they’re generally people with some startup experience who know how to crank out code and not give you as many headaches along the way.
I would not use a random contractor, and would only use the above as a last resort. It’s cliched, but if you can’t convince a technical person or two to join your team early and go in with you on it, it’s going to be tough to convince others too. Think of getting a few people who know how to build things as your first investors (even if you’re paying them... you should be paying them unless you are splitting equity like founders).
I've built 40+ web-apps in the last decade through freelancing and then had my own web-firm with a team of 8 developers all remote. I got tired of building MVPs and so switched to AWS Training and Consultancy since my passion is with educational training.
What kills projects and drives up costs was:
Client doesn't have a clear vision of what will sell.
This is evident since they have multiple business models or they keep changing features to tweak the business model.
Have one business model and be confident that you won't change anything. If you have to change then you didn't do market validation and you are wasting money on development.
Client's don't understand the scope of what goes into a app and when you ask them to block out the pages they need come back with only 30% and then an estimate is made based on whats presented. They never think about the admin panel, the auxiliary pages, support pipeline, on-boarding flow. If you can find an "Interaction Designer" who can not only wireframe but design end to end flows this will migrate developer waste.
Bringing in a technical advisor, developer, designer mid project always inflates budget because they provide conflicting advice, try to over architect over process, or now we have two sources of truth, the advisor and the client. If you want to bring in more resources you need to understand you'll be expected to adjust the budget and pay more since you made more work for freelancer/firm than previous.
Flipping the coin I have been brought into projects as a technical advisor, and I have found developers totally lieing about their work by logging fake hours or outsourcing when they are not allowed to. I helped the client gain visibility by showing them how to read git commit history, what a sprint should look like. Re-estimate out tickets and gauge an alternative velocity to help the understand if the speed of the developer matches their cost. What a good/bad commit looks like. But I don't tell the developer what to do, create tasks or make in detail architectural decisions.
AWS, Rails and NodeJS are good as your primary stack since bootcamps churn juniors as low as 2.5K CAD on Rails and NodeJS. AWS is good since it gives you full visibility and helps you enforce good practices so you have less technical debt down the road.
I've hired developers out of bootcamps, hired them off of upwork, randomly cold-emailed developers I liked. I get them from everywhere. Its a 1:40 ratio to find a developer with good work ethic.
I care about work ethic and best practices/good habits first and developer experience second.
I would suggest getting lo-fi sketches of every possible page in desktop for your admin, marketing, support, onboard, auxiliary and core pages.
Then you get a developer to code them
Then after the functionality is in place you bring in a UX designer to polish the designs.
If you have the money I would get a Interaction Design on day 1.
It is possible to build an MVP in this way - my suggestion is to take a small project with clearly defined deliverables and shop it to 3-5 minimum developers as a super alpha of whatever it is you are building.
In this way you are able to test the quality of the outsourcing company you are using / freelancer.
Also, as a note to anything - if it is not working out - fire quickly.
I'm a freelancer been working on both projects which succeed or failed. The outcome depends more on the founder however a freelancer can easily be blamed.
My few cents are:
1. Hire a freelancer if you have not enough budget to hire a studio / agency which is 2-3 times more expensive.
2. Hire a good freelancer. How much a website or app costs is not a secret. Hire a freelancer which goes by that budget and time.
3. Make sure the freelancer has done similar projects like yours.
4. Call the freelancer, have a chat, make sure you like each other.
5. Start with a one week task. If you like the outcome go for the next week. And so on. Reduce risk by divide et impera.
6. Make sure the deliverables follow standards / best practices. In other words: avoid vendor locking. If the project has to be picked up by someone else make it sure it is possible.
7. Make the freelancer you first employee / co-founder. Many freelancers would go by this scheme.
Yes and no. Remember, good programmers always work with good entrepreneurs. If you have money, you'll find a programmer. If you don't have any funding, why programmer should bother working with you? Show who you are by raising some funds for MVP. Most programmers will be happy if you raised only $10K for their MVP, because often they work on their own MVPs without any funding (and not interested in other folks who can't provide any resources like cash, engineering time, etc).
If you "but I need MVP first so I'll be able to talk to investors", drop me a line roman.pushkin@gmail.com, I have MVP.
In the US, after just taking into account Federal (24% more than likely) and FICA (15.3% including the employers side). $10K is only around $6000 after taxes and that doesn’t include state taxes. How many good developers would be willing to put work in for that amount?
If I’m already making enough where I am already over the SS maximum and I wouldn’t pay the 12.4% on SS, the extra money is probably not worth my time.
Well, for me (I am developer) it's important that my co-founder can raise money, can sell the product on the early stage. If it's possible, it gives motivation to code the product. So it's not about the money, but about motivation. I will have some sort of guarantee/confidence that when product is finished, at least we'll make few sales.
He wasn’t offering to make the developer a cofounder or give them equity. He was just trying to hire someone.
Sure if a new company was trying to get off the ground and they needed investors, I would be much more willing to invest my time for an equity stake than I would be to invest the equivalent amount of money to hire a good developer.
But, a net of $6000 with no upside is not exciting to me I don’t even own the code so I could throw it out in a private [1] repo that I could use as part of my portfolio to show at an interview.
[1] I wouldn’t just put it out in the open but I would want it to be something I could optionally give read access to show off my work.
I’m in your shoes now. I’m a UX designer trying to launch my app. The dev I hired is okay but he is not top notch. He frequently misses things that I have to catch. It is tiring but I put up with it because the alternative is much more expensive. My advice would be to triple your budget from whatever you have in mind. Developers are not robots, they can’t estimate down to the dollar like a designer could (not that you’d want that). In all of my experience of working with devs, projects tend to run well over timeline and well over budget. So if you have say a 5k budget for your app, best assume it’ll cost 15k and take 3 times longer to complete.
Another note: as a designer I have found developers to severely lack attention to detail. I get it. I’ve done dev work myself and know what it’s like to look at code and the difficulty of switching your mind to making sure every is per spec. I have worked around top notch developers and have yet to come across one with the attention to detail to never miss anything. You better be on your feet all the time and double and triple checking yourself. The product will likely never be delivered in the form you hope for.
Last thing: spell the shit out of every task. Organize in pivotal or what have you. Having an idea of how something should look or function will not always carry over to the person you describe it to. It’ll be clear as day in your mind and they will only have a slight clue as to what you imagine. Spell it out to the letter - function by function, detail by detail, item by item. I know this sounds harsh but if you don’t do this you’ll lose a lot of money fast without a finished product. The only devs who are reading this now and thinking this is fken ridiculous are the devs who are much more experienced and are likely at the top of their game - not a freelancer type you can ever afford for an MVP. I dream of working with a dev like that but like I said I have yet to come across one. Maybe they all work at google amazon Facebook, who knows?
So, expect delays, expect going well over your budget and be prepared to hand hold throughout the whole project.
If you pay consultants or freelancers you're going to get exactly what you ask for, and you're definitely not going to be getting anything better than that. Your mvp will likely be a pure standalone piece of software that you can never build upon and any changes that you want made will get very expensive very quickly. If you have a technical product and it's doing something more complicated than shuffling data around it's probably not in your best interests to outsource your development.
External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues.
In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up.
First you need to find a technical co-founder you can trust. I saw a few founders fail because they thought they can manage communication with developers alone.
You have given little information so probably you don’t have anything valuable, on average. If you have real customers, a number of people who have committed to pay for something well defined via a letter of intent or real expertise in some business then by all means go for it.
If you work with freelancers it could work out if you’re good, lucky or both. Don’t do that. Find someone who doubles your chandlcebif success and work with them instead.
You could
A. Get a job
B. Work on upwork or some other Market for Lemons
C. Do Lambdaschool.com
D. Do open.appacadenmmy.io
E. Sell a technical cofounder on you
E means showing how great you are, how much you know about your target market or how big it is or how many potential customers you have for a _detailed, particular_ idea.
I'm a consultancy owner where our engagement mode slightly resembles a freelancer model. There are a few things you should keep in mind (some of which have already been mentioned in this thread):
1. Don't participate in the race to the bottom on price. The goal with most MVPs, in my experience, is to build something that can feasibly be expanded beyond the MVP point. If you work with someone inexpensive, you're likely to wind up with something that, even if it meets your goals, will be difficult to expand upon beyond the initial scope. Of note, you should bear in mind your growth plan beyond the MVP. For example, do you want this freelancer to stick around long enough to help install an internal team? If so, you almost certainly want someone with management/hiring experience, not necessarily a recent code bootcamp grad.
2. Don't work with someone on a fixed-fee if your business has any possibility of adjustment. There are plenty of shops and freelancers out there who grossly misunderstand what it means to be "agile." Agile software development isn't just about the tools and processes one uses to build software -- it's about alignment with the business at any given point in time, and an engineering team's ability to adjust as your business realities change. For example, as you're building your MVP, if you discover that feature X is critical to a large customer using your product, you're logically going to want to introduce it to your MVP scope and prioritize it accordingly. Working with someone on a fixed fee incentivizes scope-freezes when the work is started, which might have financial advantage for you in the short term, but can greatly hinder your ability to adjust as the world changes around you and your business.
3. Work with people who are aligned with your business. Someone who isn't willing to understand the actual business machinations at play behind your MVP is not going to be understanding of your priorities, and won't be able to make informed technical recommendations. You might not think you're looking for a CTO-like figure or anything of that ilk, but when first building out a MVP that you hope to grow beyond that, this level of insight is extremely valuable.
3a. When working with consultancies in particular, do not try to offset monetary payment with stock/equity. It's a clear red flag for us.
4. Work with people you can trust. If you don't have someone in your network, go out of your way to build that trust.
5. Have an idea of what you want, but be willing to listen. Some of us have done user research a million times and know what people don't want to see in a product, and the good ones are going to bring such things to your attention. You know your business better than outside people/organizations, but they might know something you don't.
I'm happy to have a conversation about this with anyone interested. Email in profile.
I was advised to start a design doc on my own. It's kind of an idea file to flesh out what you are trying to do.
I am personally leery of hiring a freelancer to code something up for things I want to accomplish, but maybe I will change my mind someday. That's just where I am mentally currently. It's not intended to suggest that where I am currently is some Final Word.
Here is some of why I am leery:
1. In GIS school, I learned that a proper Geographic information system was integrated into the workflow of an organization and maps were generated by people needing them, people who have a purpose for the map. The information they want to convey with the map matters and serves a goal. In an organization where GIS is some department where other people send requests for maps, you get a "map shop." Map shops wind up being places that produce pretty maps.
A good nap will be described as beautiful by many people. Good design is functional and has aesthetic appeal in the vein of something well engineered. But a pretty map isn't necessarily a good map. In fact, prettifying a map because making the map is all you do typically makes it less useful.
So what I learned is that good maps are made by people who are creating the map for a purpose, not people who get paid to crank out maps. The person with that purpose is the best person to make that map.
2. When you hire it out, you miss out on founder development. Good companies are made, not born. "Self made men" go through a substantial process to get there.
The single most important element in a business is paying customers. If you don't have that, you don't have a real business. You maybe have an expensive hobby.
Doing things yourself has a lot to do with interacting with the target market and thereby learning what you need to do differently. Hiring someone to code it up may have it's place, but it may also deny you those valuable interactions with your intended customers while you focus on having code rather than focusing on having a thing that accomplishes a particular objective. Code may end up being that thing that accomplishes that objective. But it may not be.
You might try collecting stories of things that were founded without initially having code. Craig's List started as an email list.
Having said all that, I will suggest that if you do hire someone, you do your homework as outlined by others in comments here. Make sure you know what you want them to do for you. Don't just throw an idea at them and expect them to make magic.
I do freelance writing. I vastly prefer to get short, concise instructions that give me a clear set of parameters for the piece. I hate getting multiple pages micromanaging details.
So spell out the big picture stuff. Avoid micromanaging, if possible.
Last, good communication is a big part of successful freelance work. Try to find someone you click with. They can't give you what you need if they don't really understand what you have in mind.
I don't think it is. Hire a good software developer that match these criteria:
- is not a freelancer
- but is willing to do it in their free time
- genuine believes your idea is worth pursuing
- is interested in learning more about the tech that they will use for the MVP
Make this proposal: freelance paid by the hour as trial to become CTO/co-founder.
Pay the average market rate (more than the cheapest from Upwork, less than the experienced ones that freelance to big companies).
This way you attract someone interested in your success, that will create software of good quality and still will get a good deal even if your startup fails ( some money and learning).
I did this and was able to find very good developers. The startup failed on the business side, but it was a fair trade.
Ultimametly though I learned to code and I am bootstrapping a web app that I build on my own. I recommend this above all. But I understand it is not for everyone.
The problem with professional freelancers is that they can not be interested in your startup's success. You need a developer thinking about the product, not just the code. Or you can get a "tricky genius" kind of dev. That realizes your wishes exactly according to your specifications, but still manage to not create what you want. They just take the shortest path to their payment. I got burned a whole $20,000 once like this.
60 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadtake away from this
1. hire a developer you can trust.
2. he can build a team
3. don't use Node for backed (my personal opinion)
4. keep an eye on how much everyone is getting paid.
if you need help hit me up at akshay.deep0{at}gmail.com
I have been freelancing from 7years now.
1. Avoid cheap freelancers.
2. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions.
3. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it.
4. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers.
I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.
Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.
We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users.
The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time.
The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience.
The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it.
Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied.
This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
After a bit I had a decent idea, and hired an expensive designer and gave her a clear idea of what I wanted. She then did a brilliant job, producing three or four outstanding logos. I think the logo I chose is one of the best out there anywhere.
The problem with the expensive designers is that they are hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody, yet is a big part of your cost. They usually give you a limited number of designs- like 3 or 4- to choose from, and you're 'stuck' in that circle of thinking.
So if you can clarify what you want for cheap you'll better use the talent of the experts, IMHO.
>hampered by the limitations of creative brainstorming as much as anybody
That's as good a way of putting it as any. Maybe they're better at thinking "outside the box" than someone within the company or off the street. But that hasn't really been my experience working with branding and design firms--especially if you already have at least some idea of the direction you'd like to take things.
This would have replaced your fiverr exploration and gotten to the same result of using any designer more effectively.
First, it has too much detail going on. Should just reduce the number of green pages to one on each side, and increase the overall sizing. You should be able to make out all the details of a logo, 50px50px, from a distance of 24" from the monitor.
Second, all good logos work in a square-based format. Study Swami is closer to a rectangle. Perhaps trimming the overall size left/right would be better, the overall theme of it is good
Third, I think the center black line on the person is distracting. It doesn't really add value in my opinion, and both blue lines should be joined
Fourth, the color schema does evoke trust (blue and green), but I think a color gradient schema from top to bottom might work slightly better (perhaps teal, book pages uptop are lighter shade, book pages bottom are darker). Use of some shadows might elicit better effects
Fifth, I think the person should be a completely seperate color than the book, but that's just my opinion
Sixth, the curvature on the person could use some slight improvements with golden ratios. I think the person's arms should be going up not down, but again personal opinion
Seventh, I think the site overall, the text ligature and font-family should be something simpler like calibiri or Arial
------------------------------------------------------------------
As a side note you do make good points though. Personally, I am not a great logo designer I just use 99designs.com, and modify the end result in .AI if I need too.
You can usually find great logos and portfolio templates from designers, but you need a strong creative vision and design aesthetic regardless
And I appreciate your comments on the site fonts. Those are entirely my fault.
If you hire an enterprise firm who fails do deliver a product that fits your target market then the fault is on you for not doing your due diligence.
Contests are by far the worst way to go about making a design decision. You are asking a bunch of people to design something they put little thought into so they can make a big impression with little tact. Might be ok if you are doing a shitty logo but for a project that requires understanding your target audience you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
If a designer finds clients asking similar things, then the designer saves time by packaging their own work into something easily modifiable.
And yes it can also mean stuff they got off the net. Your level of discipline has no bearing on it, the client isn't supposed to know.
1/ On your side, you need to make sure you know what you want (at the very least the big picture)with a rough idea on priorities and communicate it to your contractors well. Reserve some time for questions on their side and be generally open. In return, listen to their technical feedback and take it on account when weighting on decisions. After all, you hired them because they have some level of technical expertise that you don't have.
2/ On their side, your contractors must be comfortable with showing their progress on a regular basis. This is tremendously important so you can see how things are moving, catch problems before they arise and overall steer the whole ship if need be. It is also really important that they are able to explain what they are doing and why do they do it in this order as after all they are working for you.
Finding this balance will essentially make sure the contractors have what they need to fill your expectations while making sure on your side you actually have what you are paying for.
I'd recommend getting a technical founder on board, at a very generous share. The product will also need to be pivoted and iterated on a lot. With a freelancer, they might disappear with a halfway done job.
> they might disappear with a halfway done job
So? At least that is possible with a freelancer, not with technical founder who has a generous share but fails to render good results.
I know that most people won't build things for "equity" but it is a form of investment for the technical co-founder. That said, a lot do take salary as well as equity, and it's a balance between which they prefer.
There are some benefits - like being easier to gain investor confidence, if you do have a technical founder. I think that makes it worth it.
I have built several products with freelancers. My primary area is design but I understand technology well enough that I can help solve potential problems I can even code a little (mostly php, javascript and scripting like css and html) I can also look at lover level languages like objective c code and understand kind of what is going on.
If you are building something technically complex I would say you are much better of finding at tech-co-founder or at least have some friends in the tech business you get advice from.
If you are building simpler things then you should be fine with just running it yourself.
1. Know what you need. Don't go to a freelancer assuming he understands, or cares, about your product as much as you do. 2. Be clear on every single functionality about what you need. If there's something you did not define, the freelancer will mostly always choose the easiest to implement and probably most unwanted option 3. Have a wireframe. Always use a wireframing tool to make a "flow" of how your app will work. If you can't use mock up tools, use powerpoint, but please have something ready 4. There is nothing like a cheap, or expensive freelancer. It's mostly all experience and knowledge. What you want is someone who can make what you need, and has done similar work before. A good question to test out someone's basic tech knowledge is to ask them if they know the difference between, hashing, encoding and encryption.
A "freelancer" that charges top rates will give you all that you say the client should have come up with: they'll sit down with the client, understand where they're coming from and why they're building what they're building, and come up with a complete solution, not just code.
As a freelancer you'll also land much better clients with that approach.
2. Split your project into weekly/bi-weekly deliverables that are useful to your users as standalone features (lookup INVEST in the context of Agile)
3. Have all code be checked in to your Github account
4. Have your auditor check each deliverable to make sure it complies with the standards defined before the project
Writing from a phone so couldn’t add more details. If you have questions I’ll elaborate here.
So it all comes down to working with someone you can trust. Whether that is an individual freelancer, someone you hire to run the freelancers, or outsourcing it all to a firm... you need to put your trust in them. If you have a good way to vet whomever that is, sure, it can work. But if you don't even have enough tech knowledge to do that vetting, I would recommend against using freelancers.
Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.
Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].
Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.
And it's scalable. I built https://newslines.org with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views in one day. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).
[1]https://buildify.cc/taxi-uber-lyft-driver-wordpress-themes/
Would you start a construction company without a technical co-founder, and just hire freelance carpenters to build the first few houses?
I personally know cases like this. If you are an amazing seller this is viable.
Bringing it back to OP's question, the comparison might be: many companies use technology (have a website, maybe even sell online) but are not technology companies at their core. Other companies that seem tech-light might have amazingly deep tech underlying the business.
If OP is founding a company that is going to happen to sell some things on a Shopify site, or create some gadget that has a few blinky lights on it, it could be perfectly reasonable to outsource the tech. (100% agree that if there's deep tech involved, that you need a tech-savvy founder or an amazingly committed tech advisor at a bare minimum.)
also you will need lots of project manager's and maybe 1 or 2 full time developers
I would not use a random contractor, and would only use the above as a last resort. It’s cliched, but if you can’t convince a technical person or two to join your team early and go in with you on it, it’s going to be tough to convince others too. Think of getting a few people who know how to build things as your first investors (even if you’re paying them... you should be paying them unless you are splitting equity like founders).
What kills projects and drives up costs was:
Client doesn't have a clear vision of what will sell. This is evident since they have multiple business models or they keep changing features to tweak the business model. Have one business model and be confident that you won't change anything. If you have to change then you didn't do market validation and you are wasting money on development.
Client's don't understand the scope of what goes into a app and when you ask them to block out the pages they need come back with only 30% and then an estimate is made based on whats presented. They never think about the admin panel, the auxiliary pages, support pipeline, on-boarding flow. If you can find an "Interaction Designer" who can not only wireframe but design end to end flows this will migrate developer waste.
Bringing in a technical advisor, developer, designer mid project always inflates budget because they provide conflicting advice, try to over architect over process, or now we have two sources of truth, the advisor and the client. If you want to bring in more resources you need to understand you'll be expected to adjust the budget and pay more since you made more work for freelancer/firm than previous.
Flipping the coin I have been brought into projects as a technical advisor, and I have found developers totally lieing about their work by logging fake hours or outsourcing when they are not allowed to. I helped the client gain visibility by showing them how to read git commit history, what a sprint should look like. Re-estimate out tickets and gauge an alternative velocity to help the understand if the speed of the developer matches their cost. What a good/bad commit looks like. But I don't tell the developer what to do, create tasks or make in detail architectural decisions.
AWS, Rails and NodeJS are good as your primary stack since bootcamps churn juniors as low as 2.5K CAD on Rails and NodeJS. AWS is good since it gives you full visibility and helps you enforce good practices so you have less technical debt down the road.
I've hired developers out of bootcamps, hired them off of upwork, randomly cold-emailed developers I liked. I get them from everywhere. Its a 1:40 ratio to find a developer with good work ethic.
I care about work ethic and best practices/good habits first and developer experience second.
I would suggest getting lo-fi sketches of every possible page in desktop for your admin, marketing, support, onboard, auxiliary and core pages.
Then you get a developer to code them
Then after the functionality is in place you bring in a UX designer to polish the designs.
If you have the money I would get a Interaction Design on day 1.
In this way you are able to test the quality of the outsourcing company you are using / freelancer.
Also, as a note to anything - if it is not working out - fire quickly.
Good luck!
My few cents are:
1. Hire a freelancer if you have not enough budget to hire a studio / agency which is 2-3 times more expensive.
2. Hire a good freelancer. How much a website or app costs is not a secret. Hire a freelancer which goes by that budget and time.
3. Make sure the freelancer has done similar projects like yours.
4. Call the freelancer, have a chat, make sure you like each other.
5. Start with a one week task. If you like the outcome go for the next week. And so on. Reduce risk by divide et impera.
6. Make sure the deliverables follow standards / best practices. In other words: avoid vendor locking. If the project has to be picked up by someone else make it sure it is possible.
7. Make the freelancer you first employee / co-founder. Many freelancers would go by this scheme.
If you "but I need MVP first so I'll be able to talk to investors", drop me a line roman.pushkin@gmail.com, I have MVP.
If I’m already making enough where I am already over the SS maximum and I wouldn’t pay the 12.4% on SS, the extra money is probably not worth my time.
Sure if a new company was trying to get off the ground and they needed investors, I would be much more willing to invest my time for an equity stake than I would be to invest the equivalent amount of money to hire a good developer.
But, a net of $6000 with no upside is not exciting to me I don’t even own the code so I could throw it out in a private [1] repo that I could use as part of my portfolio to show at an interview.
[1] I wouldn’t just put it out in the open but I would want it to be something I could optionally give read access to show off my work.
Another note: as a designer I have found developers to severely lack attention to detail. I get it. I’ve done dev work myself and know what it’s like to look at code and the difficulty of switching your mind to making sure every is per spec. I have worked around top notch developers and have yet to come across one with the attention to detail to never miss anything. You better be on your feet all the time and double and triple checking yourself. The product will likely never be delivered in the form you hope for.
Last thing: spell the shit out of every task. Organize in pivotal or what have you. Having an idea of how something should look or function will not always carry over to the person you describe it to. It’ll be clear as day in your mind and they will only have a slight clue as to what you imagine. Spell it out to the letter - function by function, detail by detail, item by item. I know this sounds harsh but if you don’t do this you’ll lose a lot of money fast without a finished product. The only devs who are reading this now and thinking this is fken ridiculous are the devs who are much more experienced and are likely at the top of their game - not a freelancer type you can ever afford for an MVP. I dream of working with a dev like that but like I said I have yet to come across one. Maybe they all work at google amazon Facebook, who knows?
So, expect delays, expect going well over your budget and be prepared to hand hold throughout the whole project.
External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues.
In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up.
Best of luck.
If you work with freelancers it could work out if you’re good, lucky or both. Don’t do that. Find someone who doubles your chandlcebif success and work with them instead.
You could A. Get a job B. Work on upwork or some other Market for Lemons C. Do Lambdaschool.com D. Do open.appacadenmmy.io E. Sell a technical cofounder on you
E means showing how great you are, how much you know about your target market or how big it is or how many potential customers you have for a _detailed, particular_ idea.
1. Don't participate in the race to the bottom on price. The goal with most MVPs, in my experience, is to build something that can feasibly be expanded beyond the MVP point. If you work with someone inexpensive, you're likely to wind up with something that, even if it meets your goals, will be difficult to expand upon beyond the initial scope. Of note, you should bear in mind your growth plan beyond the MVP. For example, do you want this freelancer to stick around long enough to help install an internal team? If so, you almost certainly want someone with management/hiring experience, not necessarily a recent code bootcamp grad.
2. Don't work with someone on a fixed-fee if your business has any possibility of adjustment. There are plenty of shops and freelancers out there who grossly misunderstand what it means to be "agile." Agile software development isn't just about the tools and processes one uses to build software -- it's about alignment with the business at any given point in time, and an engineering team's ability to adjust as your business realities change. For example, as you're building your MVP, if you discover that feature X is critical to a large customer using your product, you're logically going to want to introduce it to your MVP scope and prioritize it accordingly. Working with someone on a fixed fee incentivizes scope-freezes when the work is started, which might have financial advantage for you in the short term, but can greatly hinder your ability to adjust as the world changes around you and your business.
3. Work with people who are aligned with your business. Someone who isn't willing to understand the actual business machinations at play behind your MVP is not going to be understanding of your priorities, and won't be able to make informed technical recommendations. You might not think you're looking for a CTO-like figure or anything of that ilk, but when first building out a MVP that you hope to grow beyond that, this level of insight is extremely valuable.
3a. When working with consultancies in particular, do not try to offset monetary payment with stock/equity. It's a clear red flag for us.
4. Work with people you can trust. If you don't have someone in your network, go out of your way to build that trust.
5. Have an idea of what you want, but be willing to listen. Some of us have done user research a million times and know what people don't want to see in a product, and the good ones are going to bring such things to your attention. You know your business better than outside people/organizations, but they might know something you don't.
I'm happy to have a conversation about this with anyone interested. Email in profile.
Here is a comment about prototyping without writing any code:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18400363
I was advised to start a design doc on my own. It's kind of an idea file to flesh out what you are trying to do.
I am personally leery of hiring a freelancer to code something up for things I want to accomplish, but maybe I will change my mind someday. That's just where I am mentally currently. It's not intended to suggest that where I am currently is some Final Word.
Here is some of why I am leery:
1. In GIS school, I learned that a proper Geographic information system was integrated into the workflow of an organization and maps were generated by people needing them, people who have a purpose for the map. The information they want to convey with the map matters and serves a goal. In an organization where GIS is some department where other people send requests for maps, you get a "map shop." Map shops wind up being places that produce pretty maps.
A good nap will be described as beautiful by many people. Good design is functional and has aesthetic appeal in the vein of something well engineered. But a pretty map isn't necessarily a good map. In fact, prettifying a map because making the map is all you do typically makes it less useful.
So what I learned is that good maps are made by people who are creating the map for a purpose, not people who get paid to crank out maps. The person with that purpose is the best person to make that map.
2. When you hire it out, you miss out on founder development. Good companies are made, not born. "Self made men" go through a substantial process to get there.
The single most important element in a business is paying customers. If you don't have that, you don't have a real business. You maybe have an expensive hobby.
Doing things yourself has a lot to do with interacting with the target market and thereby learning what you need to do differently. Hiring someone to code it up may have it's place, but it may also deny you those valuable interactions with your intended customers while you focus on having code rather than focusing on having a thing that accomplishes a particular objective. Code may end up being that thing that accomplishes that objective. But it may not be.
You might try collecting stories of things that were founded without initially having code. Craig's List started as an email list.
Having said all that, I will suggest that if you do hire someone, you do your homework as outlined by others in comments here. Make sure you know what you want them to do for you. Don't just throw an idea at them and expect them to make magic.
I do freelance writing. I vastly prefer to get short, concise instructions that give me a clear set of parameters for the piece. I hate getting multiple pages micromanaging details.
So spell out the big picture stuff. Avoid micromanaging, if possible.
Last, good communication is a big part of successful freelance work. Try to find someone you click with. They can't give you what you need if they don't really understand what you have in mind.
Edit: See also this current post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18480115
- is not a freelancer
- but is willing to do it in their free time
- genuine believes your idea is worth pursuing
- is interested in learning more about the tech that they will use for the MVP
Make this proposal: freelance paid by the hour as trial to become CTO/co-founder.
Pay the average market rate (more than the cheapest from Upwork, less than the experienced ones that freelance to big companies).
This way you attract someone interested in your success, that will create software of good quality and still will get a good deal even if your startup fails ( some money and learning).
I did this and was able to find very good developers. The startup failed on the business side, but it was a fair trade.
Ultimametly though I learned to code and I am bootstrapping a web app that I build on my own. I recommend this above all. But I understand it is not for everyone.
The problem with professional freelancers is that they can not be interested in your startup's success. You need a developer thinking about the product, not just the code. Or you can get a "tricky genius" kind of dev. That realizes your wishes exactly according to your specifications, but still manage to not create what you want. They just take the shortest path to their payment. I got burned a whole $20,000 once like this.