The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Freelancers

This is the biggest pain of the modern software development process. Freelancers or outsource companies are not interested in your business, they are interested in charging you for hours spent. This approach is counter productive and is against common sense. Especially if you are a solo maker, not a $$$$ backed startup.

I believe to change this, we need to invent a completely new way of how software is built.

I recently met a guy who came up with an idea. He created a whole new methodology of coding stuff. It took him 4 years of hard working. He made a platform which allows making software out of separated entities which live by their own lives. Those entities (components) are developed by individuals. Therefore, projects built using a set of living components needs less maintenance work because a project is built of components which are maintained by someone else.

The only way to keep this evolution of the components going on is to benefit the makers of the components. The users of the components will pay a fee for the makers of components. Thus we get a win-win. A maker of a component can create an amazing, let's say, billing module and continue working on this single piece of code for years while being paid by 1,000 users of the component. While the users of the component just pay a small fee, hit the 'plug' button and do not care about the maintenance anymore.

This sounds like a magic, but it already works. The guy who made it already got his 100+ customers.

This is definitely true.

My plan was to brining in freelancers just to get the thing built - because I couldn't get it done.

I've since brought on two technical co-founders with a stake in the project to avoid what you're describing.

I was only able to bring them in because I had a product launched.

OP’s method accomplishes one of two things: 1) total failure 2) enough cash to hire a team that does it right.

Getting to year 2 and then replatforming what is working and killing what doesn't seems better than spending 2 years on deploying with the "perfect" architecture

Incentives matter, but it's not like early code written by founders/employees with equity doesn't need to be cleaned up later.

It was a very sudden mind shift for me. All of the sudden one day I said f* it. If I want this thing to exist, I need to focus on shipping. Not building.

The next day I hired up the freelance team.

Some people just like to build. Others want to run a product.

Either is cool. Just don't get them mixed up.

but people think everyone lies on their cv as well. the bias is there too. so in the end people just assume everyone lies. which is bad, because the bias will result in false positives.

as a contractor, i recently saved a large company’s ass because they could not find or afford to hire the right guy with the right background.

All very, very true.

Going through a trusted source is best.

This story was about getting the first iteration of my product launched (somewhere beyond MVP but still rough).

I had a fractional CTO / project manager / React dev + backend dev + devops + designer. All between 50% and 100% for 8 weeks. I also heavily participated in backend work.

Total cost came in a little over US20k.

I did not stipulate milestones and I was lucky because everything worked out (except documentation).

I definitely suggest stipulating milestones.

I was in the same position. Always justifying delays to "I learned something new". Totally forgetting the goal: ship a product. Actually putting money at stake (instead of just time) finally shook me out of that.

I looked for experience in my niche (trading/investing), got a few references, and saw some of their work.

I was never 100% comfortable going through Upwork etc because you never really know. But I spent a lot of time writing up the requirements and talking to people to get a feel.

For better or worse, in the end I went with the marketing agency that was the most transparent.

I met a top notch designer through someone I DMed on Twitter. (If you're not on Twitter talking to people - go there.) He's EUR50/hour.

If you go through an agency, then yea closer to 10k.

I think spending the money adds an urgency to ship. If not it's "just" your time.

There’s a risk. I’ve certainly been burned many times in the past. However I’ve learned and spot some issues up front.

It helps to go through referrals too.

I'm comfortable I had a market. What I had to do to get there is a story for another post :)

They built a marketing strategy for me. It breaks the effort into pre-launch/awareness, launch, and post-launch/systematize. They gave me insight into what to do when. They'll do the work or I can outsource. I've done a mix of both.

I did a short stint with a fractional CTO / front end type for US$1k per day. I had a backend developer from Vietnam for US200 / day. I'm currently working with a product designer for EUR50 / hour.

Yes, I've been running a simple site where people grab stock price data. Folks often donate to me. That was the group that I started speaking to. I now have ca. 250 email addresses on the waitlist. I've done a few surveys and had 1:1s with many people.