Angelo AG – Hiring ( 5 mins read )

Developing a software product comes with lots of technical and business challenges to overcome as well as questions to answer along the way. One important question many founders and business leaders face is how to hire my software team?. Should I get a freelancer or agency by the hour or should I hire full time team member(s) on a monthly flat fee?

The right answer depends on your current situation and specific company and project needs. Let’s see.

Let’s say you have an idea about a new product and you want to quickly build a prototype or MVP to test your idea and get user feedback but you still don’t have much budget available, in that case hiring a freelancer or agency by the hour could get the job done.

Hiring a freelancer/agency by the hour

PROS

• Get started with a smaller budget
• You may get started quicker if the freelancer/team is available.
• No long term commitment

CONS

• Less control over the development process
• Less velocity than a fully dedicated team
• Less predictability since people are mostly assigned to multiple clients
• More risk of delays in product launch.

On the other hand, if you do have the budget to start or continue developing and iterating on your product or have a more clear product vision and want to have a sustained product development velocity and predictable product launches, then hiring your team member(s) full time on a monthly flat fee is the way to go, this is what you do when you hire full time employees or hire dedicated team members through Scalant.

PROS

• Team members adhere to your process and culture.
• More control over the development process
• More control over design decisions and product quality
• More reliability and predictability since people are 100% focused on your project.

CONS

• Requires investing some time building your team before start developing your product
• Requires committing for longer than hiring hourly based.

It’s important to keep in mind that software products’ life cycles are not a matter of 6 months or so, instead software products are built, improved and used for years and so there are critical technical decisions to be made in the early stages of the product like product architecture and design, database design, tech stack selection, etc, these decisions will either get you closer to your vision and get things running smooth or will be drains of time, money and energy later on.

In that matter it’s key that you make sure to hire the right expert(s), those who are a cultural fit, people that you will be able to collaborate with and will enjoy working with and who are a technical fit, people able to provide the required technical expertise to best support you and help you make the right decisions to get you closer to achieve your vision in the fastest and best possible way.

At Scalant we make sure to really understand your vision and needs and then we collaborate with you to build the right software team (technical + cultural fit) that will be 100% dedicated working on your project(s) to help you achieve your goals and build a great software product while you save lots of money through our convenient nearshore rates.

Thanks for reading!

Published on June 18, 2022