Hiring freelance developers to help build a side project. Bad idea | Good Idea?
I was told by my developer friends that hiring freelance devs or studios is a bad idea for helping built side-projects. Not sure... If not them, then who? I am afraid that I will end up sitting around waiting for the perfect partner-in-crime..
Do you have any tech knowledge yourself?
If not, ask one of your dev friends to help you clearly specify the MVP from a technical view and to help you check the code quality of your freelancer before and after hiring.
Be brutally honest to yourself and to the freelancer about
Does it really need to be built from scratch?
Be prepared to regularily check in with your dev and make course corrections - dont expect anybody else to take much responsibility and drive for your idea!
Thanks patrics.
Solid advice.
I think that what it boils down to is that freelancers are not a bad idea in the end but I have to be ready to chase the projects since they do not have the incentives of an employee or of a technical cofounder that are invested in the project..
I am product manager with a good technical knowledge.
My strengths are not the tech aspect though and I believe I should do those instead of learning to build it myself from scratch.
ill give it a go... learn and repeat. 🙌
If you can find the right one it works out great. I've helped numerous people get their business ideas off the ground.
The problem happens when you try to go for the cheapest price not the person who can actually complete the job. Lots of freelancers over promise and under deliver.
I like to think I've come up with a system where my clients get exactly what they ask for and then some without all the BS.
I am a developer and I have some experience in hiring freelancers from freelancer.com and upwork.com
The major reason I hire other developers is for expertise and to save time. I also realized that when I hire other developers I am much more productive in overlooking the project and concentrating on features, marketing, hosting, emails, UX...etc
I don't recommend it unless you have some knowledge of what those freelancers doing. I have around 30% failure in hiring freelancers. Its difficult to guess their technical level before hiring. Some claim they are expert to get the project later you will realize they are not. And some charge a lot, sometimes it takes 2,3 times to the time you initially thought, so project cost rises very fast.
Generally I have more success with upwork but I am lucky to find one good developer on freelancer who is not only charge less but very quick in delivering. Other than for that one guy I don't go to freelancer.com any more.
Solid advice.
Thanks
It's not bad at all if you have a strong plan, finances and strong willing to launch your product. I worked on both sides and should say that most of projects fail just because founder abandoned them not because of other reasons.
A lot of it depends on the person outsourcing and to be honest the op' s developer friends are probably in a better position to make that call than we are.
I don't think its a bad idea. I think if you feel your time is limited or want some help from someone with more experience, I think its fair.
My advice is to be really clear about what you want, what an MVP means for you. Then think about how you would transition from the freelancer to maintaining it yourself. Think of a budget you would be happy to spend to test/validate this idea.
Would Bubble <bubble.is> or Dropsource <dropsource.com> help you iterate faster/more cost effectively?
Thanks datadavis!
After checking them out; the would definitely be a tool to create a first iteration to test the idea more cheaply indeed.
I just need to sort out if the code will be good enough in case I need to iterate on it with the help of developers in the future or if they will have build everything robustly from scratch.
Webflow is another consideration
Indeed. The most important thing at this stage (in my opinion) is what you can learn -- the more you figure out in the beginning, the better you will be able to scope out a project to hand to someone else (and control your costs in the process).
I suppose that partially depends on the kind of project you have in mind. So, what are you working on?
Working on a street food discovery app. Simple search & display of available street food trucks/stalls around you.
The Problem: Foodtrucks use twitter/insta to update customers of their weekly schedule(they move around the city). This leads to the fragmentation of information + people need to first discover and follow the foodtrucks somehow in order to get the updates(if they are not buried in the bottom of their feed).
Will start from a native app(iOS).
More of a passion project, not really a 'startup' kindof idea ;)