When creating an MVP, do you hire devs to make it even if you're a dev?
I have a 9-5 job that pays decently well. I just don't feel like making the mvp despite having several ideas for one. Should I just pay a few hundred bucks to get a basic MVP, and then I can fine tune it later?
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Do you have the time? If money is no problem, then how much you can work on your project and how soon you can go to market is important.
Second angle: think about after launch: will you keep your developers to expand the feature set and move into a marketing role? If you're not comfortable in a marketing role, you should probably be outsourcing that instead.
There's nothing wrong about hiring devs to build a demo/MVP, although I'm not sure what you can achieve with a few hundred dollars.
As someone who hired an agency to build an MVP before, I would advise against it. There's so many reasons why that could go wrong. Every MVP is different. In my case I was quoted 1 month to build the MVP and ended up abandoning the entire project after 10 months of still not having the MVP ready. (note that I worked with a respectable agency which had fantastic feedback score).
TLDR: If you're excited about the project I would spend some time in the weekends to get the thing off the ground, then hire people to build from there.
Thanks for the info. Gonna have to look you up, seem like you have been through the process a few times, lol.
Outsourcing can be a pain, especially if you're building literally the first version of the product. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions
Hi @Sterling729
That's a great question, and I think there's only one, unfortunately, boring answer - it depends.
I'd say if you feel like it's a couple of hundred bucks to get the MVP done, then it's is not worth outsourcing is as you can build it yourself reasonably quickly. You will spend more time looking for the right contractor and explaining your idea, handling contracts, etc.
On the other hand, if you are looking for additional value besides just coding (UX/UI design, product workshops, brainstorming the problem and solution, managing releases and feature flags etc.), I think it's worth considering collaboration with an experienced dev shop or freelancers.
It's difficult to give you direct advice as I'm not aware of the product idea, scope, and how you define a"basic MVP". From my experience, founders who can code rarely look for outsourcing if the workload is smaller than two weeks full-time.
I hope this helps.
Disclaimer: I run a software development company and founders looking to build PoCs and MVPs represent about 65% of our client base. If you can provide more info, I'd be in a position to give a more accurate piece of advice.
Thanks for the advice. I just started my new job and trying to get a handle of things. So, trying to learn a relatively new stack (electron) and building a desktop app isn't really appealing to me at the moment lol. However, hearing what you said, I may try to get some work done on my own, even if it's a little bit each night.
I think this is totally reasonable. I've done this in the past when I had a well-paying job. It might be hard to get anything good built for a few hundred though.. unless you're just looking for a landing page to collect interest. You could also use something like https://divjoy.com to get an MVP out quickly (disclaimer: my project).
Only alone during weekends.
In my opinion more time you waste for documenting and conversations than you spent on code.
Remember if you don't like it maybe it's not a way for you? Most exiting part of creating products is "creating" not earning and supporting.
Making MVP these days is not hard with no-code. Even it could be more than just MVP. So, in general, you can improve and scale your product regarding market feedback. Even if you don't have time to launch it with nocode, the cost of a solution is about 5-10x less than traditional development and at the same time is about 5-10x faster.