Transitioning from solo dev to delegating
How do you transition from solo developer to paying for help once you start making money?
Ideally I'd like to outsource, freelance, contract or hire just one developer to start.
But I was told you can't do this. As a solo developer we do everything: the design, UX, infrastructure, backend, frontend...
But when you hire you can't hire an all-in-one dev. You can find a backend developer but you'll need someone else to do UX, design and frontend.
This mean I couldn't hire one developer and tell them to do build a whole feature. Do to that I'd need a team- UX, design, frontend, backend, etc.
But hiring 4 full time employees all at once sounds like a lot... not only cost wise but also a lot to manage as a first time manager.
How do you transition out of solo dev an into delegating work? What did this transition look like for you?
I write around these topics around experiment better and iterate faster at building profitable products here Zero To Founder
First of all delegating tasks isn't bad and that's how our economy runs. We delegate tasks all the time in our day-to-day activities. But when it comes to building products, some people are not intersted because of the time it takes to interact, guide, mentor, seek advice etc.
There are two sides of the story of delegating.
Will you be delegating something that you already know
or
Will you be delegating something that you don't know.
## Delegating something that you don't know.
## Delegating something that you already know.
What ever model you pick, my suggestion would be to go with 'delegate with aysnc model' where you run the whole flow async with only may be 1 call once a week or even once two weeks. This makes things extremely smooth. I understand in some cases, its not possible. But if there is some chance to do it this way, I would highly recommend. That saves you a lot of time.
But just note that - Delegating tasks take time for the first couple of weeks until you are in sync with the other person. With someone who is a good fit and a little bit of on boarding time for 3-4 weeks, this will be extremely smooth and in most cases you can work in an async model.
Thanks Upen!
I really wonder if you took any action on this as I see your revenue has tripled since your posting :)
After starting as a solo dev, I hired 5 of my friends aka ex-colleagues as part time freelancers without any revenue from the product :) (Of course, there are more details to disclose)
You should absolutely be delegating to some people you trust both themselves and their work. Full-time hiring is another chapter though. I'd start with a full-time freelancer for the most time consuming/has high learning curve position and then "what you're best at" one.
Yes, I'm just getting the hang of using contractors!
I should document all that I tried nicely one day, but I'm going to try to just get outa bunch of thoughts here before I forget:
I think the first thing I tried was getting live help with a bug on codementor. It was NOT helpful. The person wasted my time. Not entirely their fault, I think I was misusing the site.
Then I posted about that bug on a few sites. I think Codementor and Upwork. Got a lot of responses but wasn't confident that the people who sent me proposals really understood my issue. One did but wanted access to my mongo cloud. I wasn't comfortable with that.
I went to a lot of friends and mentors and asked for guidance. A few tips they had:
When you make a post looking for help, tell people to say some words in their response or answer some questions so you know they read the proposal. For example, "Please include a one-sentence summary of the project in your response so I know you read the project", or "Please start your message with 'Hey Dashie!!' so I know you read this."
Try to pick smaller tasks to contract so you can assess how you work together before committing to a larger project.
The first thing I outsourced successfully was help with email. I paid someone around $200 or $250 to show me how to set up dmarc, dkim, etc. It was a good beginner task because they didn't need to touch my code. They told me what to do and why. It saved me time learning it myself. They met over video several times and emailed me.
I was confused about who to hire for the code. As founders, we do everything from design to legal to marketing and full-stack. Can I expect a coder to do the front and back? Should they also know design?
I decided to try to find a senior full-stack dev who was great at UX/UI. I posted on Upwork, dribble, and linked in (just a status on my profile). I got a lot of replies from people who did not fit this description. I realized I was looking for a unicorn.
Another founder recommended this UX/dev pair who work with indie hackers. I like that they knew the position I was in since they were familiar with the Solodev/indie hacker world. To illustrate the importance of this; one lady responding to my dribble tried to charge me 17k for a simple account setting UI/Ux project. 8k and 1 month of which was for customer research. It sounded like she thought she was about to work for some huge corporation making scientific breakthroughs in UI. So I liked the idea of working with someone who understood they needed to be lean to work with an indiehacker. The project I hired them for was to come in and finish a feature I started.
Now it was time to set up my environment to onboard devs. I made a seed script so devs could seed a local DB with data from real accounts of various types with PII removed.
I made a READEME.md for how to set up the project. It had looms and text.
While I set this up, I hired someone else who I'd been chatting with in indiehacker twitter to help me figure out how to share my mongo cloud metrics without PII. It cost $200 . The deliverable was basically a custom tutorial with looms and documentation. They got on a few video calls too.
Back to the two person team, I finished the readme for the whole app which I could use to onboard any dev in the future. But I also made a feature readme just for the project I wanted them to do with looms, pictures, and text. One tip they said was "over communicate" when it comes to contractors. I really focused on trying to make my feature readme easy to follow, kind of like I was creating a nice tutorial for someone. I used the edit feature on loom a lot! We communicated mostly through slack, looms, comments on Figma, and video chats. The UX guy prefers async, so I have never been on video with him live but I got to know him by sending each other looms. The dev wanted to go on zoom several times. We agreed to 1500 for the project. They are a 12hr difference from me. So far that's been fine.
They are still working on the feature. We check in every day on slack.
At the same time, I'm having the guy who helped with mongo help some more. He's making more reports/ custom tutorials for different issues I have with mongo: weird alerts, help understand Mongo's indexes and schema suggestions. I'm paying him per project 150-250. He's a little expensive because he lives in the US. But for now, it's fine. He is going to connect me with someone cheaper who lives in central America and also has more free time.
This is where I left off.
OMG! Now we know all the details, great :)
So, I see you're making good progress. At least, the devs now are able to touch your code ):
I don't hire anyone from Upwork but I also freelance with my team. Finding the right freelancer is really important in terms of time and money. Sometimes it's worth hiring the "better" to get things done when you have a lot to do.
Yeah, these were the details I was looking for when I posted this haha. I want to make a longer video too with more details.
I've had success finding people through Twitter and the IH community on Twitter + recommendations.
@scoops86 also directed to https://dynamitejobs.com/pre-vetted-candidates (like upwork but pre-vetted) and https://www.remotefirstrecruiting.com/.
I am currently having success with Upwork for a smaller side project.