Hire a Freelancer or a Technical Expert When you Are Stuck With your Idea
You might not be choosing the right sort of help to build your physical product if you don’t know what each offers.
It is almost impossible to have knowledge about everything. And why would you anyway? There are people out there with much more experience in their field and you surely don’t want to spend thousands of hours trying to learn what others already master.
If you had a car breaks down, would you fix it yourself or take it to a mechanic? If you had a leaking pipe, would you fix it yourself or call a plumber? If you had a tax issue, would you fix it yourself or ask your tax agent?
If you have answered that you’ll fix it yourself to any of the questions above, you are either a professional in any of those fields or it’s your passion and hobby. If not, you are likely getting into unnecessary trouble.
Believe me, I am an engineer myself and trying to understand how everything works, is just ingrained in my brain. But I have found myself trying to learn about almost anything and wasting hours and days looking for any useful or relevant information.
I could have probably used that time more effectively doing something else where I can bring actual value.
Let’s say you are trying to build a product but you have no technical background, maybe you are a salesperson, a marketing guru or a real state broker. Would you add more value trying to design your product, or rather talking to your customers or building your brand?
In most cases, to design and manufacture your physical product, you will need to hire someone to do it for you. You can either hire a design or development firm (expensive) or most likely, if you are in a tight budget (inventors and entrepreneurs usually are), consider a skilled freelancer.
Is that your best option? Let’s see when it would make sense to hire a freelancer or rather a technical Expert so you can use your time and resources wisely.
Hiring a Technical Freelancer
There are many places you can look for technical freelancers, either in your own network, look around your LinkedIn contacts, or online marketplaces (Upwork, Freelancer, Guru).
Consider hiring freelancers when you want something done that you have no knowledge whatsoever or you simply don’t want to spend time on it.
Some common tasks in physical product development are conceptual design, product renders, mechanical design, electrical design, design for manufacturing, prototyping or product testing.
A freelancer will have the skills, hours of experience and time to do the job for you for an agreed cost. This will be a medium to long term cooperation, likely weeks or months for the above tasks.
Hiring a freelancer requires a certain level of trust.
Committing to hiring someone online that you probably don’t know anything about despite some brief profile and a few reviews is maybe not a compelling option. In exchange, you get a large number of options to choose from, you just need to know how to choose right.
One advice I can give you is to have a first chat (video call if possible) and get to know how they work, their previous experiences and make sure you are comfortable with their communication. If aiming for long term cooperation, offer them a first smaller task to evaluate their work before committing further.
Consulting a Technical Expert
On some occasions, what you need instead is a particular piece of advice or suggestion. You are able to do the job on your own, maybe you have certain experience already but you are stuck with one particular aspect that escapes your level of knowledge.
You need that validation from someone more experienced than you. But it wouldn’t make sense to hire a professional for something that could be discussed in an hour or two. A better option would be to consult an expert in the area that you require some knowledge about.
Consult a technical expert when you need concrete advice and validation of your work to help you keep moving with your project.
However, and especially for non-technical people, finding a technical Expert might feel like searching for a four-leaf clover in the Sahara.
That is why certain platforms are recently offering services to access Experts on-demand. Imagine that you can get access to that particular knowledge just when you need it and without having to spend countless hours looking for the right information.
I have found that most of these Expert platforms are still focused on high-level corporate advice at strategic and executive levels. In order for this to be useful for more execution-level activities and knowledge, there should be a poll of experts that can provide advice that you can actually use in your product.
I had this need myself on several occasions, where I was not sure about a particular technical decision for a design or I just wanted a second opinion for peace of mind. Luckily for me, I can usually turn to my engineering colleagues for advice, but I realize this is not the case for most of you.
In Abilista, we have started offering our own poll of technical Experts with specific skills related to the design and manufacturing of physical products. I’ve found that this is the level of expertise that can be useful for many entrepreneurs and startups looking for concrete and actionable advice to build their products.
Here it is a real example where Experts was a clear choice and helped the user to get the knowledge he needed right away:
The user was looking for suggestions for a plastic material suitable for a novelty drinking device. Getting in touch with someone with expertise in product design and wide knowledge about plastic materials provided the user with a curated list of food-grade material options. This helped to ensure that the product requirements and market regulations were met and saved the user the time of going through thousands of generic material choices without proper notion of what he needed to be looking for.
Understand your needs
The most important question is for you to understand what you need to get done. You can ask yourself the following question to make you think where your efforts would be most valuable.
Are you familiar with the job at a competent level? If so, does it make sense for you to spend the time doing the job compared to the opportunity cost of dedicating that time to something else where you could significantly add more value?
If you decide that it makes more sense for someone else to do the job (and you have the budget), then your option is to hire a Freelancer. Remember to consider the time that you will spend searching for the right one, communicating and dealing with them.
If, on the other hand, you can’t afford to hire an external engineer and you think you can do the job with occasional support and advice from experienced professionals, consult technical Experts on-demand.
Obviously, both approaches are compatible and you should ask yourself the above question for each particular situation in which you need to choose between one or the other.
Choose Your Options Wisely
As you can see, there is no right answer, and it ultimately depends on what your context is and what you need to get done. There is definitely an increasing demand for experts with specific knowledge and skills and an increasing number of online platforms facilitating access to these Experts.
You don’t need to have the skills or knowledge about every aspect of the development and leveraging the different options that you have to access expertise and knowledge will make all the difference in building a successful product. So, choose wisely where you will dedicate your valuable time.
(Connect with our Technical Experts. Get Expert advice on-demand )
Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.
If you want to read more stories like this one visit our publication page
