Do not be cheap, it will be even worse

I am moonlighting two products (tech & writing) and have a full-time job, plus 2 kids (also quarantine and no kindergartens the past 3 months 🙀). I am not saying this for praise or pity, but to emphasise how overwhelming it is to do all that. So I needed help.

I have some budget for the project anyway, and thought, "well, there are tons of these freelancing services like Fiverr, and there are so many cheap gigs there, what can go wrong?" So I started to execute the things and initially thought to give Fiverr a try, at least for the things I feel least competent. It all began quite nice I'd say, got logo, got landing page, woah! 😎Easy life!

Then I started to do something more complex. The first constraint was a design quest I've made. The person selling, ranked amongst the top 50 UI/UX experts in the service. They gave me signals that they understood the requirement. Then, they didn't communicate for 1 whole week after I accepted the offer, which made me really unrest. However, after 2 weeks of struggling and few under the expectations deliveries, we mutually agreed to cancel the gig and get a refund. So I find another person for even cheaper price. Uh oh! 🤑 Much more structured, they start with wireframes, give insights and proposals, I am impressed! All this for 300 bucks?! Give, give! I approve the first steps. Then they go missing for 2 weeks, 10 days in my projected deadline for the Design sprints. And when I say missing, I mean really missing, dude was gone. I had to contact the Customer Support to get the gig canceled. The person wrote me after a week apologising, saying I am very unreasonable, I have to understand him "I had to go to my Village in Pakistan to celebrate Ramadan, there was no Internet connection there". Customer Support recons this, cancels the gig as the delay was 2 weeks, so I said, well fuck it, I find some more serious web developer to execute the whole project top-down (UI, UX, development, bugfixing, deployment, everything).

So I found one. Rated 5 (clean 5) stars by more than 1000 customers, had shown me the progress after a week of work. It was unbelievable how much in the wrong direction it went. Now you may be thinking - "well it could be something up to you as it's getting repeated", but I am telling you it is not. I am very structured when it comes to requirements definitions and planning. Not to even mention that it is impossible to get the money to your account without waiting for days and tons of explanations via hidden customer support channels.

The morale of this story, I guess is: don't be cheap even if you bootstrap simple things. A lesson I learned in a funny way was that there is a reasoon why good things cost. If you want to involve someone to get your product developed, be prepared to pay reasonable amount of money. And that is ok. For me the solution was to find a proper team of people via Freelancer and get this done. It cost lot more but also, besides results, you pay the chance to get the job done better. And on time.

Just felt to share this.