Your Contract Developers Are (Probably) Hosing You — Part 1, Overview

Don’t stop believing, hold on to that feeling.

Does this sound familiar?

• You have a big dream for a product, app, or website that you want to build.
• You aren’t an engineer or highly technical.
• You’ve got a limited budget.
• You’ve hired, or are considering hiring, contract developers to build your product.

Sadly, this is a recipe for getting badly hosed. You could easily spend all of your savings and end up with a barely functional, buggy, ugly, unmaintainable prototype. If that happens, your dream won’t see the light of day, and that is both sad and avoidable.

I’m really glad you have a dream! I don’t want to discourage you from following it. Quite the contrary, I want you to have a realistic idea about how to bring it to life, and save you from wasting your time and money going down dead ends.

I’ve spent time with quite a few super-smart, ambitious, energetic founders that are in this position, and I’ve started to see some patterns. In this article series, we’ll talk about what those mistakes are, and how you can avoid or correct them. Here’s what I have planned:

1. (This Article) — Overview
2. Preparing To Use A Contractor
3. Types of Contractors
4. (Coming Soon) — Choosing A Contractor For The Win
5. (Coming Soon) — Incentives and How To Align Them
6. (Coming Soon) — Holding A Contractor Accountable — The Big Picture
7. (Coming Soon) — Holding A Contractor Accountable — The All Important Details

How You Got Here

Surprisingly, Lladro doesn’t make a unicorn.

I’m assuming you’ve done some basic validation to give you confidence there is a market waiting for your app that uses AI to select the optimal Lladro figurine for a wedding gift based on your cousin’s tweets, or offers BitCoin micropayments to yoga instructors that optimize your headstands. You’ve thought of a name, bought the domain, started an Instagram feed and gotten 57 likes on the headstand photos. Good!

You aren’t a programmer yourself, so you can’t just go build it. You might think you can run off to a coding bootcamp and then build it yourself, but I can tell you right now, you’ll be no more qualified to build a shippable product at the end of bootcamp than you will be to build a car from iron ore. There is a massive difference between even a good final project and a usable, professionally built app.

Your best option, at this point, is to get a technical cofounder. Maybe you think you don’t need to do this, because, hey, this idea is worth millions… billions… why should I give up a big chunk of my company to someone who just comes in to write code? Or you might be open to the idea, but don’t have the network to find a good technical cofounder that is willing to work for little or no pay initially, but take equity.

The problem is, your idea is basically worthless if you can’t get it built, and built reasonably well. This should be like a mantra to you. You don’t want to believe it, but it is true. Without a good, reasonably non-buggy, somewhat delightful product that you can put in the hands of actual customers, you’ll just be another sob story at the bar. Seventy five percent of millions is WAY more than one hundred percent of zero. If you can find a technical co-founder, do that! (And I should probably write a whole ‘nother tome on how to choose and validate that person.)

Let The Hosing Commence

You can write your own caption.

So you’ve got the dream, you’ve done some rough validation, you desperately want to get building, and you’ve concluded you can’t build it yourself or find a technical cofounder. That means you are going to have to use some flavor of contractor, whether it is a fancy agency, an offshore team, or an individual developer. We’ll talk about those tradeoffs in the next article.

It sounds pretty straightforward. You’ll pick your developer, agree on a budget and a timeframe, keep a close eye on them, and soon you’ll have your first version ready to roll out. What could… possibly… go wrong?

Here’s a partial list. Don’t freak, in the upcoming articles we’ll talk about how to prevent or resolve these problems.

• They don’t actually have the expertise to build your product, they are planning on learning on your dime
• They choose a technology stack based on what they know, rather than what is appropriate to your product
• You have massive time and budget overruns, but you can’t afford to fire them and start over
• You haven’t adequately specified the problem, and you haven’t hired a designer to help figure it out
• They load spectacular overhead charges onto your project
• Because of time zones, it takes days to resolve the simplest problems
• You keep changing your mind, and each change order costs a pretty penny
• They build literally what you ask for, but don’t use any common sense
• They build you into a corner, so it does literally what you asked for but what seems like the simplest little change is practically impossible
• They don’t build automated tests or use any human QA, so the app only works on Wednesdays if you are standing exactly in the right spot and cross your toes. Especially if you are showing it to customers. When you show it to customers, the worst bugs immediately start popping up.
• They haven’t planned for deployment, security, scaling, analytics, logging, data warehousing, server costs, compliance, documentation, or a million other operational details that can burn you instantly
• They write incompetent code that, even if it serves as a first prototype will have to be thrown away and rewritten from scratch
• The breakthrough you need is always just right around the corner, if you can just keep paying them for one more sprint
• And in the worst case end game, they stop answering your messages and run away with your source code and service passwords

Now, admittedly, I made that list terrifying because I really want to get your attention. If you are non-technical, haven’t hired contractors before, read that list, and your feeling is “I’ll be fine”, then… godspeed! If you read it and thought, “There be dragons”, then stick with me on this journey and we’ll see if we can reduce your risk and increase the odds that your money and time are well spent.

Also, none of this is to say that there aren’t great agencies and contractors out there, or that you can’t be successful with them. It is totally possible, but you need to know how to improve your odds.

If you have specific questions or topics you’d like me to address, add a comment. And if you have found this helpful, don’t forget to give it some claps, share, and pass it on to a friend with a dream.

Continue to Part 2 — Preparing To Use A Contractor.

About Michael: I’m a senior technical leader and startup CTO based in Seattle Washington. I’ve built everything from dinosaurs to sous vide cookers. I’m looking for my next role.