Building Zoye, Part 3 - Looking for a Developer.

Our first plan was to hire someone to build it. I'm glad it didn't work.

We talked to developers. Good ones. And every conversation ran into the same wall, which wasn't about skill at all. It was that we couldn't hand over the thing that mattered.

The specification wasn't "build a CRM with these tables". It was a feeling. It was, this should understand what I mean when I say "Dana wants a quote by Thursday" and it should do the four things that follow from that sentence without asking me four questions. Every time I tried to write that down as requirements, it came out as either something too vague to build or something so specific it missed the whole point.

At some point Marcel said what we were both circling. We were about to pay someone to guess at the part only we understood.

So we built it ourselves. Not because we couldn't afford help, and not out of some purity thing about founders writing every line. Because the product was still a question, not a plan, and you can't outsource a question.

The only people who could sit with it long enough were the two people who couldn't stop thinking about it anyway.

This isn't advice. Plenty of great companies hire early and do fine. But when the thing you're making is still a question, the obsession has to come from inside the room.

Question to you, the founders who built the first version yourselves: would you do it that way again?