Any experienced software developers who paid freelancers to build their MVP?
I recently left my job as a lead developer at a startup to begin contracting part time whilst working on my own projects. Soon I will release my first mobile app (an auto scheduler powered by reinforcement learning) and will begin the post launch promoting / bug fixing / improvements shortly after.
I have also been thinking about a number of ideas for projects I think could do well however I do not have the time to build or validate them all.
I am considering paying freelancers found on sites like Upwork to build MVP's for me. This would give me more time to spend on marketing / legal / finance etc and would potentially be cheaper than me building them (when I take into account my day rate). However I am worried that after a relatively large investment I will have harder to maintain code or a product that is not quite right and it will cost me in the long run.
Are there any dev's out there who had similar concerns but still hired freelancers to build and MVP / initial product? How did it go? Where did you find the developers? What issues do you face?
I am a developer (and SAAS owner as well) and I face this issue all the time. We do have a small internal team but to do some nice to have things or new ideas, I have tried to use freelancers from time to time. The problems you will face are:
Freelancers are , well, freelancers. They have no interest in your actual business or product (mostly) and they want to code something out for you. So expect them not to love the MVP so much as you do.
Most freelancers don't care about writing quality code. TO be fair though, that takes extra time and you may have deadline for them due to the nature of the MVP. So guess what ? You will end up with code that you will probably need to re-factor anyway. With MVPs, that is the case anyway so you may be ok here but it is a lot easier to fix your own code than someone else's.
If you don't have an exact scope and possibly good documentation of the requirement, don't expect the freelancer to iterate on the MVP the way you may do it yourself. The reason is that they wont have a clue as to what is in your head. So you need to be more specific and clear. This sometimes will add more time and headache and you may think "heck I could just crank this out quickly without needing to explain to anyone"
You can certainly use freelancers to help supplement the development speed but remember to keep these points in mind.
Great points, I think a good starting point might be to use freelancers to supplement development of a project which I have done the ground work for. After which, I could take what I learned and make a decision on whether an entirely externally built project is worth it.
Some form of partnering might be another option.