When hiring a freelance developer for your MVP project, the key factors to consider include skill fitment, industry or domain experience fitment, and budget fitment. Hiring freelance developers has become much easier in the post-COVID world, as it enables you to hire people across the globe.
In this article, we will explore how freelancers can help you build your product, how to select freelance talent, and the questions you should ask when selecting the talent.
How can freelance developers help to build your MVP project?
It takes a team to build anything meaningful. I learned this hard lesson after my first start-up failed in 2011, when I thought I could win in this world on my own. The co-founders were there, but my immaturity in doing everything on my own, as I didn’t believe that others would deliver the same quality, ability to manage the founding team, and their unwillingness to leave their comfort zone, led to new ideas not taking off.
When the second start-up succeeded, I realized that freelancers had significantly contributed to the initial success. We hired U/UX designers from Russia and a mobile developer from Ukraine, who contributed a lot to designing the next-level UI and developing the mobile app, which was developed at 1/3rd the cost and later managed in-house.
The freelancer developers were not just cost-effective; they also helped us keep the team lean during the initial days of developing the MVP. While the team was focused on developing the web part of the MVP, developing mobile apps through freelancers brought the required agility and speed to achieve completeness in the solution.
How to Choose the Right Freelance Developer
Hiring is an art as well as a science, and unfortunately, many people don’t know how to hire the right freelance developers. Sometimes, hiring the wrong person not only delays the launch of the Minimum Viable Product but also increases the overall cost and causes more anxiety and stress.
How to evaluate a developer’s technical skills and compatibility with your product needs.
Evaluating a freelance developer’s technical skills will be difficult if you lack technical expertise. The solution is to hire someone from your network who already has these tech skills and use them to hire the freelancer. Another way is to use freelancing platforms that vet the talent on your behalf before you hire them.
The following are the technical skills that are required in a full-stack freelancer developer to develop an MVP successfully :
| # | Skill | Skill Description |
| 1 | Great Verbal Communication Skills(In English if your primary language is English) | The person can explain things clearly to non-technical folks, probably using analogies |
| 2 | Strong System Design & Architecture Skills | The person can define the architecture of the product and can design the blueprints for the entire system, which is scalable and secure |
| 3 | Awesome Frontend Coding Skills – Web Apps | The person is a web magician, making things look amazing and work smoothly on screen. |
| 4 | Strong Backend Coding Skills: | The person is a web engine mechanic, keeping things running smoothly under the hood. |
| 5 | Good UI/UX Sense | Someone can wear the designer hat and make sure the code translates into a great user experience. |
| 6 | Ability to Deploy Application to Cloud | The person can get the product up and running on the internet using cloud platforms |
| 7 | Ability to set up CI/CD | Can set up a system that automates testing and deployment, saving time and reducing errors. |
| 8 | Ability to create and update the DBA person | Ready to structure the database efficiently to store and retrieve information quickly. |
| 9 | Ability to Write Secure Code | The person prioritizes security, writing code that protects user data and keeps the system safe from hackers. |
| 10 | Ability to Write Wellanyone who | can write clean and organized code that’s easy for you and others to understand and update in the future. |
| 11 | Ability to Write Scalable Code | The person can write code that can handle more users and data as the startup grows. |
| 12 | Critical Thinking | The person cannot just accept things at face value, you question and think things through. |
| 13 | Proactive execution | One who has a proactive execution mindset is the engine that gets things done fast. |
| 14 | Time Management | The person who can manage time efficiently and prioritize tasks is an important skill to ensure that work tasks are completed on schedule. This includes the ability to handle multiple tasks and deadlines concurrently. |
Questions to ask potential candidates:
Sometimes you must assess new candidates’ problem-solving abilities and familiarity with your project’s required technologies. Here is the list of critical questions that you can ask your potential freelancer developer to understand their problem-solving abilities:
● How many tech products have you developed from scratch to date? What was your role in building those tech products?
● What was the most complex problem you solved in developing those tech products?
● How do you approach problem-solving?
● How do you evaluate different solutions to a problem?
● How do you handle unexpected challenges?
● How will you handle the large amount of data processing?
● How do you optimize backend code performance?
● How do you optimize frontend performance?
● How do you prioritize tasks?
● How do you balance multiple projects and tasks?
Recording the interview and post-interview by reviewing the transcript can give you much information about the potential candidate. You can always rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 5 and compare the candidates objectively before you make the decision.
What are the key factors when hiring a freelance developer for your MVP project?
Creating and innovative thinking, relevant skills in the industry, and domain expertise are the core skills you should look for when employing a freelance developer. Let’s look at each of these in bit more detail:
1. Creative and innovative thinking
Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a creative process, and you need people in your team with a high creativity quotient and good problem-solving skills. In today’s competitive world, the tech product you will be launching has to be at least 3X to 10X better than the current alternatives your customer is using or currently available in the market.
To build a 3x to 10x better product, each team member needs to think in a higher order. Your potential customer should see your innovation and creativity in every aspect of your tech product, operations, and sales approach.
To gauge the freelancer’s creativity quotient, ask open-ended questions like “What was the last thing you created on your own?” and “Why did you choose to create what you created?”. The kind of person you need on your team is someone who has developed something on their own and has given it shape and form in the real world.
2. Industry and domain expertise
Depending on the complexity of the product you are developing, domain expertise is a must for mid to high-level, complex products. Consider this: if you are developing something in FinTech and the developer has expertise in developing a tech product in the FinTech domain, he/she will be able to understand the terminologies and lingo you are talking about and probably will be able to contribute more effectively to building the MVP.
But suppose you cannot find a developer with an enterprise in the same domain and industry as you are building your tech product. In that case, it’s your responsibility first to make them understand the domain and its terminology.
The second most critical aspect here is to communicate the things you want to get developed in a way that is easy for the developer to understand and develop the product based on that. In the world of agile product development, its called “User Stories Documentation,” which will have the following components:
- What problem are we solving, and why are we solving this problem?
- How will the system behave after this new functionality is developed?
- Which workflows will be impacted after this functionality is developed?
- Which user personas will be affected after this functionality is developed?
To achieve this, you must have a product manager in the team if you cannot play that role as a founder.
3. Technical Skills and Specializations
An ideal freelancer developer profile should look something like this
● At least should have 3+ years of experience working in an early-stage start-up.
● The freelancer should have developed at least one product from scratch and maintained it for 6 to 12 months after completion of development.
● He/she should have worked on the front-end and back-end layers. Ignore hiring the freelancer developer who has just worked on developing a frontend layer or just the backend layer of the product. Let’s understand this in a bit more detail:
○ When you are hiring a freelance developer, you also have to hire a backend developer, leading to more cost at your end
○ You have to give inputs and manage two people
○ Communication gaps between two people might lead to delays in development.
● Freelancer developers should be well-versed in building a secure, scalable, and manageable product.
● Freelancer developers should be able to deploy the application themselves on the cloud server.
● And if the profile includes working in the same industry as your tech product, that is a plus.
When evaluating the freelancer developer, ask open-ended questions like “What is the most complex problem you faced in developing the product and how you solved it?” or “Can you describe a complex system you’ve designed? What were the challenges, and how did you overcome them?”
At MMT, we interview and evaluate all the freelancers in our talent network in detail on the skills relevant to the role.
4. Budget Considerations
Developing the MVP should be divided into two phases to ensure it is completed on time, within budget, and with good quality.
● Phase 1-Discover & Design: In this phase, you understand your market, identify the personas, create user journeys, finalize UI design, and create an MVP roadmap. You should also make a website with a landing page, put the product design there, build a sales pitch deck, and start selling to gauge market demand. Take your time with developing the minimal viable product, but spend 3 to 6 months in this stage talking to customers and improving your understanding of the market and customer pain points.
● Phase 2 – Building the MVP: Once phase 1 is done right, this is where you build the system based on the MVP roadmap defined earlier. You will refine the MVP roadmap further based on your understanding of the market and the customer. Divide the entire MVP to be developed into cycles of 3 to 6 months and start building version 1.0 of your product.
Both the above-listed phases will need a budget. The most common cost elements included in these phases are
● Phase 1: Discover & Design expenses include
○ People Cost: This phase needs a Product Manager and a UI/UX designer. Play the role of a product manager or UI/UX designer, if you have working experience in either of these fields.
○ Tool Expense: You might need access to a design tool, but if you hire a freelance designer, they usually have bought the tool’s license, like Figma.
○ Website Cost: Buying a domain name, official email, website development, and hosting costs.
● Phase 2: Building the MVP
○ People Cost: This phase needs a Product manager, HTML/CSS Developer(if developing a web application).
○ Cloud Infra Cost: The product will be hosted on the cloud, such as AWS, Azure, and Digital Ocean. To keep your costs low, host your testing server on a VPS like Digital Ocean, Webdock.io, etc.
○ IT tool cost: You will need tools like GitHub or BitBucket to manage the version of your product code and a project management tool like Jira. These tools are initially free for small teams.
Tips to save cost when developing the MVP include hiring a freelance full-stack developer and hosting your product initially on cloud hosting platforms like Digital Ocean, Linode, or webdock.io. To achieve a higher-quality MVP on time, make sure that someone on the team plays the product manager role.
5. Communication and Collaboration
Though we cannot generalize this, software developers are good at communicating with computers but need help communicating with people. When selecting a freelance developer, check the person’s ability to articulate things and whether they can help you understand technical challenges easily.
Preference should be given to the developer who can understand the product requirement, ask questions that further enhance his/her understanding of the requirement, and convert it into code. Don’t go for a hiring setup where you cannot directly communicate with the developer who is doing the job. For founders from a non-technical background, first hiring a product manager and then hiring a product developer will make more sense. The product manager will understand the business requirements and create the documents that the developer can use to develop the product better.
Make sure that you set up a catch-up cadence (the tech world calls it a scrum meeting) daily or at least thrice a week to get a status on the work progress and understand the roadblocks to the challenges.
6. Work Fitment
Everyone’s work style is different, but it’s imperative to set expectations upfront about availability, meeting catch-up times, working hours, and the frequency of updates. In addition, explicitly communicate what behaviors are not acceptable at all. For example, when I hire any new team member, I make it clear that lying about anything around work OR not consistently meeting the deadlines will be a big red flag for me.
7. Legal and Contractual Considerations
Getting the contract signed is the first step that should be done before you start working with the freelance developer, whether you are hiring a freelancer in your country or outside your country. A good contract has the following major elements:
● The Statement of Work
● Clearly articulating that subcontracting is NOT allowed.
● Statement about the equipment and tools.
● Details of the payment and frequency of payment
● Terms and clauses on liability, indemnification, taxes, and renewal.
● Ownership of the work and disclosure of the work
● Confidential information, non-disclosure clauses, and competition-related activities
● Data protection
Getting the contract signed is a must-have activity before engaging freelance talent, especially when hiring someone remotely.
8. Testing and Quality Assurance
Developers hate testing the work they have done. Ensure you set the expectations from day one that the freelance developer will test the product on the testing server before declaring any work completed. You cannot check during the interview session whether the developer has the habit of testing the developed code properly; it’s a habit that needs to be built or enforced continuously.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best practices for hiring freelance developers for a startup?
When hiring a freelance developer, ensure you clearly understand the specific skills required and craft questions that assess their actual proficiency. Prioritize hiring hands-on developers directly rather than intermediaries like agency owners or project managers. For long-term engagements, use practical assignments to evaluate candidates. Avoid underpaying, as it often leads to poor results.
What is a good hourly rate for a freelance software engineer or app developer?
For a start-up working on developing an MVP, a good product developer(web app or mobile) can cost anywhere from $30 to $90/hr. But remember, the developer output will be as good as the input. The output of a good developer becomes even better when you hire an average UI/UX designer or product manage.
How much is the cost of freelance app design?
For a start-up working on developing an MVP, a reasonable UI/UX designer cost will also be similar to the app developer, which is anywhere from $30 to $90/hr.
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