Pitfalls to avoid when working with agencies
Coming from personal experience, there are tons of ways working with an agency can go wrong. I’ve spent $120k working with 4 agencies: SEO, paid acquisition, conversion copywriting, and design.
I also know the situation from the other side, as I run a development marketplace to hire vetted engineers (http://lemon.io).
Having matched hundreds of developers with startups and worked with agencies myself, I found what makes choosing an agency a success. Sharing my personal checklist:
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadInclude code ownership into the contract. Outline that you own the right to the product and the associated intellectual property.
Pick the team that uses the same development approach, has remote culture, shares similar values and you’d generally like to hang out with those people.
Verify that the agency has a replacement policy in case of bad hires or other issues. Have an agreement that outlines who owns the right to the product and the associated intellectual property.
Make sure you have the technical co-founder or CTO to make the macro decisions. If you don’t want to include someone full-time, you can get started with a fractional CTO. Don’t outsource strategy.
Figure out if you can get the small commitment from the beginning. Focus on delivering a smaller MVP with the ability to change developers on the way (if it gets stuck). Get iterations with user feedback as early as possible to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. Move in short sprints. Pay for milestones.
Spend time scoping the development, UI or QA tasks or ask for just scope beforehand. Having clear requirements will help you manage the costs.
Ensure that the developers assigned to your project are the ones actually doing the work. Be sure, the dev is fairly paid.
Meeting the team can help you check the fit before starting the project. If you’re looking for a dev agency, chat with developers beforehand. Soft skills are as critical as ability to code. Avoid working with agencies that underpay their developers.
Start with research: find testimonials or real products the agency helped build. Check the “Showcase” section on the website. Open Trustpilot & G2. The more previous experience you can see, the better.
User stories, jobs to be done, roadmap or design: whatever specification you have. Otherwise, much of the code will be thrown away. Same rules work for marketing agencies. If you don’t know your users and positioning, none of the agencies will do marketing for you.