Pondering an Age-Old Question: Get a Dev Partner or Hire Freelancer for Startup?
I have a successful, self-run business selling a logo exporting extension for Adobe Illustrator. I'm beginning the process of expanding my offering by developing an asset management web app to accompany the extension.
I've been chatting with a very knowledgeable and trustworthy person in the tech startup realm for over a year and this person has recently offered to come on board as a partner with a 50/50 revenue split. They would be responsible for building the app, and I would be responsible for just about everything else.
The obvious benefit of this relationship would be no upfront development cost. I'd obviously pay for it down the road and there would be lots of paperwork involved.
Alternately, I could hire a freelancer (like I did to get the extension developed) but there would be upfront costs.
I'm interested to learn about other's experiences in this realm. Especially people who have been solopreneurs with a fair amount of success.
Thanks!
Hire freelancers that is best. Are you looking for one. Thank you.
I had an interview a few months ago for a CTO role at a profitable tech startup.
The company was built by a non-tech person who had leveraged his connections to hire foreign developers for cheap. He had gotten the web app running and profitable by pure luck. Now he was getting frustrated with language barriers, lack of support, and timezone differences so wanted to bring on someone local.
I interviewed with the founder and then interviewed/met with the foreign developers. I was offered the job and after looking at the setup and current state of development I was forced to send a long list of "things that need to happen in order for me to accept this position". It was things like improved security, a real backlog, regular sprint meetings, code comments & documentation, separate dev & production servers, and version control/backup.
What I learned out of this experience and what you should consider is that a freelancer/contractor wants to quote you the lowest sustainable price in order to win the job. They then want to keep their overhead and time commitment down in order to maximize their own profit on the job. Those things are natural and to be expected but invisible things like code backup and dev servers that are not contract deliverables suffer b/c they do not generate profit for the freelancer.
On the other hand, a CTO/co-founder has skin in the game so should care about information security, future liabilities, backups, server up-time, and all the other ops part of DevOps.
Hope that helps,
That is a very valuable perspective. Thank you. I do not plan to source the job to the lowest bidder. In fact, I knew that the developer for my extension was way underestimating, so I doubled his quote. We have a great working relationship (this person is not under consideration for the app partner).
I would be vetting devs who price things fairly but are close to premium. I'm a Graphic designer by trade, so I know the proposal game very well.
Security, backups, server up-time. Those things are all very foreign to me though, so making sure I had an iron-clad contract with every deliverable in place would be very important indeed.