The market research is done now looking to hire someone two develop MVP. I have to queries;
First: should I hire a development team or freelancers to develop the idea?
Second: After development, QA and release do I need a development team on permanent payroll for support?
It is the old question of time vs money, that most entrepreneuer face.
First everyone assumes their idea is great. I am not talking to you personally but the statistics show that this is not the truth. Even with careful market research (not just asking Google and friends) there is always a chance your product will be a failure nobody wants. So would you rather have tanked 50k to 100k on an expensive MVP nobody wants?
So what is your alternative:
Finding a co-founder, who can code it: less risk/less reward
Finding an investor, who will front you the money: less risk/less reward
Using one of the many NoCode options like Bubble.io - almost no risk / but takes a lot of time risking being too late or never getting anything finished
So you see there is always a downside. You are the business owner. Only you know the scope of your idea. Only you will ultimately have to live with the consequences of your decision.
If you need help talking about the specifics, just give me a call. I am glad to help.
-Gerd
You're at an exciting stage, well done for getting this far.
Having been in a similar experience we decided to go for a development team with a small company that specialized in helping startups bring products to market - they are called https://kanso.io/
The reason I went for a small development team was that they understood all facets of the business and the CEO lead the product spec phase with me which was incredibly useful.
When you're creating an MVP I found it very important to have not only a development team with expertise in development but also in product design, to create a great product from a user's perspective which aligned with what customers needed as well as how we needed the product to work business-wise.
This may not be the best solution for everyone but it worked well for us even post MVP for a year, until we raised sufficient funding to bring the technology in-house.
Good luck!
As a pre-MVP startup, I would recommend the following for the MVP
1. Hire a co-founder who can help you build the MVP
2. Hire freelancers to build the MVP. If you do with this option, you will have to be extremely clear on what you want done or can be a huge $ and time sink. Some of the freelance websites that have worked well for me are Toptal (surprisingly good talent here!), Fiverr and Upwork.
It depends on what you want to do after the MVP has been developed. The resources available to you will determine what to do. If your resources are limited, then it is advisable to hire freelancers who would earn by the hour and move on. If your resources is a bit on the high side, then you should gather a development team.
Whatever you do, know that if you intend to take the product to the top- which I assume you do, then it is better to get a development team that will work on the product from scratch. This will enable them to already be familiar with the developmental stages of the product. Unlike if you chose freelancers, the movement of product from MVP stage will be difficult and you will probably have to pay more to a new set of freelancers to understand the initial MVP stage. It means in simple terms, if you hire freelancers you get to pay twice cos you may not be able to gather the same team of freelancers but not so with the development team.
As you know that money matters in any business to become successful, so to decide you must focus on expenditures. Let us look at the options you have.
Hiring A Freelancer: Many freelance developers prefer working with entrepreneurs for software development MVPs and prototypes. You can find several freelance platforms to discover developers that can meet all your needs, such as freelancer.com or upwork.com. Write down a list of features, develop some mock-ups of how you want the site to look, along with the technology that will best fit your product. Obviously, the developer will have his own opinions on technology and tools, so make sure you know the right and wrong. The cost of MVP development that a technically advanced developer will charge on average is $12,000-$20,000. Do not skip getting proposals from a few developers, you must necessarily like to compare the cost.
Going In-House: In-house development lets the team be fully involved in the project, which makes it the first choice of many CXOs. In an MVP development process, the in-house developers provide transparent relations and clear communication. Regardless, the quality is your liability. Your developers are more motivated on the success of the company, though. When you start with a small budget, that may be a challenge. You must use an MVP cost calculator to analyse if this is a good option or not.
Local App/Web Development Companies: Hiring an MVP app/website development agency can turn out to be an expensive choice. The companies manage everything all by themself. Apart from this, there can be communication and expectancy issues. Considering a project completion may take up to 6 months, the cost of MVP development may shoot up to $96000 in total or $64,000 per month.
You can read more here: https://www.yourteaminindia.com/blog/cost-of-mvp-development/
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
In the very beginning, and in most of the cases, you do not need code to validate your idea...test first before developing, with techniques like the concierge, build a landing page and do the operation on backstage, just like Airbnb did ou Zappos, use no code tools, templates...
Only after idea validation you should build code, and then the best is find a technical co-founder that has built something, because at that stage you will need an MVP.
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