Finding the Right Tech Talent for Your Startup
“Should we hire a developer, work with a freelancer, or find an agency?”
We get this question a lot. With so many possible options, many of the startups in our network want to know the best way to bring technical talent into their project.
The answer to this question, like most in the startup world, is that it depends. Your circumstances and preferences, such as budget and desire for control over the process, will help to determine the best choice for you. What works well for one startup may be a bad choice for you and vice versa.
The one generality that is safe, is that learning something technical yourself is always a good idea. It doesn’t take much to give you a general understanding of a technical topic and will make all the difference when you are working with a team to build something awesome.
So, if you’re a startup founder and you are building an application based product, how do you navigate the trident fork in the road and pick between hiring, going for a freelancer, or bringing in an agency? Here are some of the most important factors to consider:
Budget: How much are you willing and able to spend on tech?
Control: How much control do you want to have over each step of the development process? How much input do you want the developer to have?
Your Experience: How much experience and knowledge do you have in the tech industry? How comfortable are you in assessing the technical ability of others?
Timeline: When does your app or website need to be finished? When are people going to pay for it, or find another solution?
Hiring Developers
Offering a high degree of flexibility but coming at a high cost, hiring in-house development is typically only something to consider when an application is the core piece of your business.
While hiring a developer (or several) is the most direct way to add programming capacity to your business, it’s also probably the most challenging. It’s an expensive solution for a startup, as software developers have in-demand skills, and you’ll likely need to offer a competitive salary to hire an experienced developer.
There’s also the issue of making sure that the people you hire actually have the skills and knowledge that you need. If you’ve worked in related industries before, you should be in a pretty good position to make that call. However, if your startup is part of a career switch, be careful not to overestimate your ability to assess the strength of a potential hire’s technical skills. Instead, you should try to leverage your network and get recommendations from people you trust.
If you have the budget and are able to find strong technical candidates, then you unlock some serious benefits by bringing them on. One of the biggest benefits and drawbacks of hiring a team will be that you’ll have a high level of control over what they do. You’ll have full ability to instruct your new technical team to start, stop, switch, modify, change, tweak, and add whatever you’d like to your project. Of course, your experience in software and technology will come into play here as well. You need to be careful not to waste your resources developing unnecessary features for your product. With good direction, however, an in-house dev team can be extremely efficient.
There are also several positive X-Factors that come with hiring a dev team. Building a team of employees is an incredibly rewarding and fun way to experience a startup. You’re bringing people along on a ride with you, and the emotional support during the highs and lows is simply irreplaceable. Over time, you’ll build a strong working relationship with your team, making all of your processes more efficient as your team will grow deeply familiar with each other and with your product. These aspects take time to develop, but can be invaluable to growing company.
It’s tricky to line everything up and get the best out of hiring a dev team for your startup. If you consider yourself a non-technical person (i.e., no direct experience with coding/engineering), I highly suggest finding a technical co-founder, and not just hiring employees on your own. A good technical co-founder will be highly committed, and will have a wealth of knowledge and experience that will be vital in making hiring decisions. They’ll teach you things about tech that you didn’t realize you didn’t know.
Offering a high degree of flexibility but coming at a high cost, hiring an in-house development is typically only something to consider when an application is the core piece of your business.
Working with an agency
An agency can be a good fit for many startups, offering the skills of a full development team (and often more), without the cost of employing them full-time.
The relationship you have with an agency can be one of giving marching orders for them to follow, or one where ideas flow in both directions. Many agencies (ours included) prefer something more like the latter. One of the most valuable resources that an agency has to offer to its clients is its experience. The collective experience of their developers, designers, and other team members has exposed them to a wide variety of projects, and has given them insight into the common problems that plague clients and the best practices to make them succeed. If you’re a founder without an in-house technical team, it’s in your best interest to listen to what your agency partners have to say about your project; they’ll likely be able to give you some insight that you wouldn’t have on your own. Of course, you may know exactly what you want and prefer to have developers that do what they’re asked with little pushback. Whatever the case, you’ll need to find an agency that suits your preference.
For a non-technical founder, finding a good agency is somewhat less challenging than making good hires. Most agencies will feature their past work prominently on their website (if they don’t, that’s a bad sign). Just taking a look at what they’ve done on their website should give you a pretty strong indication of their technical abilities, but your best bet is to talk to one of their previous customers. Talk to a founder that was in your shoes a few months ago that worked with the agency. Ask them how the project went. What was the quality of the final product? Did it meet their expectations and do what it needed to do? How well and how often did they communicate? Getting answers to these kinds of questions right from the source will help you to evaluate an agency that you’re considering. Often agency work is restricted by NDAs, so your candid conversation will give you much more confidence in your decision either way.
Many agencies can also provide you with additional value by plugging you into their network. Agencies also have much larger networks than most people do individually. They network full-time with organizations, throwing events, attending conferences, running meet-ups, and generally being as visible as possible. As a result, they’ve built up deep and diverse networks of companies and professionals. Even if you’re looking for a technical co-founder, an agency might be able to point you to a previous employee, meetup group, or local talent that crossed their radar. You really have nothing to lose by asking.
Freelancers
Usually having a larger network than a potential hire, and a narrower skillset than an agency, a Freelancer is typically the go-to choice for a relatively simple, quick, and cheap project.
A diverse and versatile group of people, freelancers can be a bit difficult to generalize. You can find freelance developers all over the world, specializing in any language or framework you can imagine. Some will be students or recent grads looking to cut their teeth with small, fast projects; others will be experienced professionals who simply prefer the independent lifestyle afforded by freelancing.
Usually, you can expect freelancers to be the cheapest of the three options. They could likely make you a prototype or simple website for under $5,000, and will almost always bid lower than an agency for a similar job. However, bidding so low also means that will typically want to get the job finished within a very tight timeline in order to stay profitable. This can lead to frustration on both ends, especially if you feel that the end product does not initially live up to what was promised, and want them to spend further time improving it.
Finding freelancers is easy, but finding good freelancers can be a struggle. Sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and more can get you in contact with a freelancer in a matter of minutes, but it’s hard to know just how reliable they’ll really be. Anonymous online reviews aren’t too helpful in this regard. Much like with agencies, I’d strongly recommend trying to get in touch with someone who’s worked with the freelancer you’re considering before you commit to a project.
Of course, in this article, I’ve presented some massive generalizations and oversimplifications. The point is to be aware of the options you have, and to be self-aware of the situation you find yourself in now. All three of these options can be good, for the right situation.
I’ve worked with all three, at different times, and I’ve had good experiences and bad experiences across the board. It’s like anything else. It depends on trust and a shared vision for what you’re trying to build. If you’re able to connect with someone and they understand you and you understand them, then it’s probably a good idea to work with them regardless of the category they fall in.
