Settling for a Freelancer

It’s been a while since I last posted (a month actually). You would expect things to either have not moved forward at all (given the lull we discussed in the last article) or for strides to have been made.

In reality I would say we have made progress that locates around the middle of that scale. I am quite proud of that. I’m proud because it has been a real slog just to keep moving forward at all but we have managed to do it.

Over the last month, I have quit my day job (not because im going to devote full time to this app), Stef has been on all sorts of holidays now he is on his summer break from school and Ronald has had his workload jacked up to the max at his day job.

When we last left off, I had just taken the decision to stop pursuing Tim (the designer). After Tim I tried a number of resources; cofounderslab.com, Fiverr.com and a few others. Each time I would find a few relevantly experienced people and reached out to them by private message or email or linkedin and tried to strike up a conversation while making clear what i was bringing to the table.

When all of those options didnt work, i reverted to oDesk (or UpWork as it is now named). I wrote up a brief job description (plucked mainly from the development document) and posted it. I also invited a few people to apply for the job that i found with the right skills.

One of those people, Andrii, from Ukraine, responded a few days later and we hit it off straight away. We had a similar sense of humour and he was really responsive. His portfolio looked really good and creative and his proposition for costs wasn’t too far off what I was hoping to pay.

We had quite a few back and forths to set expectations and I sent him the development document (which i expanded the section on style guide first) and i also sent him a link to the early version of the app.

We agreed on 3 milestones (based on the design requirements myself, Ronald and Stef had thought of a few weeks prior — detailed in my “how to find a designer” post);

1. deliver and receive toms acceptance on design requirements 1 and 12 (including delivery of physical files)

2. deliver and receive toms acceptance on design requirements 2,5,6,8,10 (including delivery of physical files)

3. deliver and receive toms acceptance on design requirements 3,4,7,9,11 (including delivery of physical files)

We agreed that there would be an option (by either party) to terminate the agreement after the first milestone so that if creative differences arose, we could end it there before we became too reliant on each other.

The first milestone was agreed at 50 Dollars. This would mean that we would not lose too much money if we did not like the designer, but it was still a fair deal for thhe work to be done. The last 2 milestones were agreed to be worth 225 dollars each so the total for the project would be 500 dollars and I would cover the UpWork fee pf 10% (so 550 dollars in total).

Good, finally that is ticked off the list, now to actually get some designs.