It could be, if you do it right. As a former freelancer and now consultancy owner, I suggest you to:
1. Avoid cheap freelancers.
2. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions.
3. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it.
4. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers.
I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.
In my experience, the expensive freelancers can be even worse than the cheap ones. They often take a well padded amount so they could outsource it to someone cheap.
Here is an anecdote that maybe others can relate to:
We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users.
The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time.
The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience.
The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it.
Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied.
This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
adding on to this, it is important when you draft the wireframe that you think through all possible paths that a user can take through the MVP and whether any application state is maintained between user actions. Those should be noted in the wireframe.
Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.
As a former freelancer myself: here's what i hate about clients:
1. Know what you need. Don't go to a freelancer assuming he understands, or cares, about your product as much as you do.
2. Be clear on every single functionality about what you need. If there's something you did not define, the freelancer will mostly always choose the easiest to implement and probably most unwanted option
3. Have a wireframe. Always use a wireframing tool to make a "flow" of how your app will work. If you can't use mock up tools, use powerpoint, but please have something ready
4. There is nothing like a cheap, or expensive freelancer. It's mostly all experience and knowledge. What you want is someone who can make what you need, and has done similar work before. A good question to test out someone's basic tech knowledge is to ask them if they know the difference between, hashing, encoding and encryption.
Totally disagree with you. What you're describing is a code monkey, in which case it's a commodity and a race to the bottom.
A "freelancer" that charges top rates will give you all that you say the client should have come up with: they'll sit down with the client, understand where they're coming from and why they're building what they're building, and come up with a complete solution, not just code.
As a freelancer you'll also land much better clients with that approach.
I agree with the first part, but your second example is pretty much exactly how the residential construction process works (and likely the commercial sector as well, but I have no direct experience there). The general contractor hires local subcontractors (roofers, electricians, plumbers, rough carpentry, finish carpentry, drywall/plasterers, painters, tilers, etc), manages the overall project timeline and budget, and pays the subs.
Bringing it back to OP's question, the comparison might be: many companies use technology (have a website, maybe even sell online) but are not technology companies at their core. Other companies that seem tech-light might have amazingly deep tech underlying the business.
If OP is founding a company that is going to happen to sell some things on a Shopify site, or create some gadget that has a few blinky lights on it, it could be perfectly reasonable to outsource the tech. (100% agree that if there's deep tech involved, that you need a tech-savvy founder or an amazingly committed tech advisor at a bare minimum.)
I recently had a house built, which exposed me to a dozen general contractors (people/companies referred to as builders). Not a single one of these small shops had a carpenter on staff. They were all basically project managers that subcontract all labor and earn their fee by adding 20% to however much is spent.
I wouldn't call GC's non-technical. They know all of the pieces that it takes to get the thing built and the community of construction workers have multiple general skill-sets. The best part about your GC might be that he knows how to hire the right people.
The worst part about being non-technical is that you can't really tell who is good and who isn't.
I'd recommend getting a technical founder on board, at a very generous share. The product will also need to be pivoted and iterated on a lot. With a freelancer, they might disappear with a halfway done job.
Ideally register the company when there's something to show. Even if the company has been registered, this is where vesting kicks in. Agreed that it's probably harder to fire one, and worst case, you might have to abandon the company and start a new one.
I know that most people won't build things for "equity" but it is a form of investment for the technical co-founder. That said, a lot do take salary as well as equity, and it's a balance between which they prefer.
There are some benefits - like being easier to gain investor confidence, if you do have a technical founder. I think that makes it worth it.
I help run a company (turtle.ai) that intros startups to vetted freelance devs.
We have a several non-technical customers that went from nothing to an MVP with paying customers. Here are some suggestions for building an MVP with a freelancer:
- Make sure you've got designs first. It's 10x cheaper to iterate on designs than code.
- Start with a low budget, ideally less than 10-15k. This constraint forces you to prioritize what is important and launch quickly. Launching quickly is critical so you prioritize features based on real feedback. By delaying launch, you risk sinking money into features nobody cares about.
- Work in weekly iterations. Jump on a call with the freelancer each week to check on progress and set priorities for the upcoming week. Keep a close eye on the budget to make sure costs aren't getting out of control.
- Get someone you trust to review the code early on to make sure the freelancer is doing a good job. If the code is an unmaintainable mess, it will be hard to add other developers to your team as you grows.
Having a CTO is the ideal but is not always possible at first. Once you have a product with traction, recruiting a CTO becomes easier. It separates you from the founders who have nothing more than ideas.
1. Hire a technical auditor: someone who can set standards before the project starts and checks that the freelancers are sticking to them. This can be a more expensive engineer but you pay for less hours.
2. Split your project into weekly/bi-weekly deliverables that are useful to your users as standalone features (lookup INVEST in the context of Agile)
3. Have all code be checked in to your Github account
4. Have your auditor check each deliverable to make sure it complies with the standards defined before the project
Writing from a phone so couldn’t add more details. If you have questions I’ll elaborate here.
If you pay consultants or freelancers you're going to get exactly what you ask for, and you're definitely not going to be getting anything better than that. Your mvp will likely be a pure standalone piece of software that you can never build upon and any changes that you want made will get very expensive very quickly. If you have a technical product and it's doing something more complicated than shuffling data around it's probably not in your best interests to outsource your development.
External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues.
In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up.
Remember the M (Minimum) in MVP. It doesn't have to be great. It just has to show you, your customers and your investors that you have given some though to how your product will work in practice.
Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.
Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].
Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.
And it's scalable. I built https://newslines.org with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views in one day. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).
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1. Avoid cheap freelancers.
2. Always start with small tasks to test a freelancer. Assume a freelancer is unreliable until proven otherwise by his actions.
3. Make a wireframe yourself, then hire a designer to design it, then hire a developer to develop it. To save money, you can skip the designer, but the end result will be ugly. You need to decide what you want to build and specify how it will look like BEFORE hiring someone to build it.
4. If you don't want to or don't know how to make a wireframe, consider hiring a good consultancy to do it with you. They're more likely to have this skill than freelancers.
I believe essentially you need help building your MVP, and your options (freelancing, full-time employee, co-founder, or consultancy) are just different ways of getting that help, they don't matter as much as finding someone you can trust, and managing expectations, especially your expectations.
We hired an expensive design firm that had done the work and designs of other companies in our sector. Those companies had decent UI and a good amount of users.
The company spends a lot of time doing something like a vision quest to accomplish branding, and UI designs take a long time.
The UI was nice to see come together, but it was clear their designer had no experience with this kind of product and target audience.
The branding and logos and typefaces are top notch. It is all congruent with a story and has good rationale behind it.
Now, the external development firm we work with also has designers in it. The work we do with them is billed at $60/hr when that designer is involved, so the designer is probably getting $40. In the scale of cheap vs expensive when it comes to designers, this is not considered cheap, but it is much less than the prior "enterprise design firm". Cheap would be the $5 talent in Pakistan on Fiverr. This designer is able to crank out UI designs in a day, we can review them and modify them midflight using collaborative tools, and I am much more satisfied.
This isn't my first experience with this, but my thoughts are that design is hit or miss. It just comes down to creative vision, experience, or the series of templates the designer has. Doing a contest or getting proposals will get you a better distribution of possibilities, and the designer's process and pipeline is more important. The $5 Pakistani can also be good. You just need an efficient way to get design samples.
Your primary objective in creating the wireframe is to answer all questions regarding the application state and user flow and also to remove any unnecessary complexity.
1. Know what you need. Don't go to a freelancer assuming he understands, or cares, about your product as much as you do. 2. Be clear on every single functionality about what you need. If there's something you did not define, the freelancer will mostly always choose the easiest to implement and probably most unwanted option 3. Have a wireframe. Always use a wireframing tool to make a "flow" of how your app will work. If you can't use mock up tools, use powerpoint, but please have something ready 4. There is nothing like a cheap, or expensive freelancer. It's mostly all experience and knowledge. What you want is someone who can make what you need, and has done similar work before. A good question to test out someone's basic tech knowledge is to ask them if they know the difference between, hashing, encoding and encryption.
A "freelancer" that charges top rates will give you all that you say the client should have come up with: they'll sit down with the client, understand where they're coming from and why they're building what they're building, and come up with a complete solution, not just code.
As a freelancer you'll also land much better clients with that approach.
Would you start a construction company without a technical co-founder, and just hire freelance carpenters to build the first few houses?
Bringing it back to OP's question, the comparison might be: many companies use technology (have a website, maybe even sell online) but are not technology companies at their core. Other companies that seem tech-light might have amazingly deep tech underlying the business.
If OP is founding a company that is going to happen to sell some things on a Shopify site, or create some gadget that has a few blinky lights on it, it could be perfectly reasonable to outsource the tech. (100% agree that if there's deep tech involved, that you need a tech-savvy founder or an amazingly committed tech advisor at a bare minimum.)
I personally know cases like this. If you are an amazing seller this is viable.
Deleted Comment
also you will need lots of project manager's and maybe 1 or 2 full time developers
I'd recommend getting a technical founder on board, at a very generous share. The product will also need to be pivoted and iterated on a lot. With a freelancer, they might disappear with a halfway done job.
> they might disappear with a halfway done job
So? At least that is possible with a freelancer, not with technical founder who has a generous share but fails to render good results.
I know that most people won't build things for "equity" but it is a form of investment for the technical co-founder. That said, a lot do take salary as well as equity, and it's a balance between which they prefer.
There are some benefits - like being easier to gain investor confidence, if you do have a technical founder. I think that makes it worth it.
We have a several non-technical customers that went from nothing to an MVP with paying customers. Here are some suggestions for building an MVP with a freelancer:
- Make sure you've got designs first. It's 10x cheaper to iterate on designs than code.
- Start with a low budget, ideally less than 10-15k. This constraint forces you to prioritize what is important and launch quickly. Launching quickly is critical so you prioritize features based on real feedback. By delaying launch, you risk sinking money into features nobody cares about.
- Work in weekly iterations. Jump on a call with the freelancer each week to check on progress and set priorities for the upcoming week. Keep a close eye on the budget to make sure costs aren't getting out of control.
- Get someone you trust to review the code early on to make sure the freelancer is doing a good job. If the code is an unmaintainable mess, it will be hard to add other developers to your team as you grows.
Having a CTO is the ideal but is not always possible at first. Once you have a product with traction, recruiting a CTO becomes easier. It separates you from the founders who have nothing more than ideas.
2. Split your project into weekly/bi-weekly deliverables that are useful to your users as standalone features (lookup INVEST in the context of Agile)
3. Have all code be checked in to your Github account
4. Have your auditor check each deliverable to make sure it complies with the standards defined before the project
Writing from a phone so couldn’t add more details. If you have questions I’ll elaborate here.
External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues.
In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up.
Best of luck.
Developers generally don't want to build an MVP, so they will indulge your insecurity by adding features you don't need right now, adding time, adding cost, and sapping your energy. It's hard as a non-technical founder to fight back against this. You don't know what you don't know.
Instead, I always advise non-technical founders to build their MVP by themselves using a WordPress template. There are literally thousands of templates, many of which are clones of existing applications For example, here's an Uber clone [1].
Using WordPress will allow you to 1) take control of the MVP process 2) create a look and feel for your site 3) test out various plugins to improve functionality 4) if the plugins don't do what you want you can then hire a WordPress developer to make the missing functionality, which will be a much lower cost than getting them to build the whole thing.
And it's scalable. I built https://newslines.org with WordPress, which was able to handle over one million page views in one day. Total customisation developer cost: less than $10,000 (and that was for a ton of work).
[1]https://buildify.cc/taxi-uber-lyft-driver-wordpress-themes/