One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations.

The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical).

He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies.

It was a shitshow.

I had respect for the one chap that basically said "Get back to me, when you know exactly what you want."

I had absolutely zero respect for the agency that said they would deliver a full MVP, in three months.

After that, I just said "Screw this. You'll just get ripped off. I was looking for something to work on, so it might as well be this."

It's been a long process, but we are now in the home stretch. I don't even want to think about how badly he would have been screwed, and I'm quite un-thrilled with the ethics of the folks that claimed they could deliver the app in three months (fairly large-scale backend, and high-quality frontends for mobile clients).

Sounds more like you got suckered into working for cheap by someone you know. Unless the app is drastically different than the last CRUD app the firm did, 3 months is plenty of time to run find-replace on a codebase.

I read it he volunteered to work for cheap for a friend, out of charity, or pity even. Your second sentence I don't quite understand, you mean the original shop did a bad job? Well, yes.

Nope.

It probably would have been quite different, and I guarantee that they would have come up with some bolierplate crap that they had their offshore devs whip up for next to nothing.

The demographic we're Serving has some very particular needs, they don't have much money (501c3 means nonprofit, if you are not familiar with the designation), but there's tremendous sensitivity in how the data is handled, and also in how the UI is presented. Small features will make (or break) the app.

Long story, and not one I'm particularly interested in sharing, at the moment.

It's all good.

BTW: I'm not working for "cheap." I'm working for free. I'm enjoying it.

Nice good luck to u and ur friend

Knowing exactly what you want is really important, and where most non-tech people fall down.

It's very easy to come up with vague, hand-wavy "big pictures," and a different matter, entirely, to make it happen. Those "details" will kill you.

That's why having not just a technical founder, but one that has experience shipping is important (IMNSHO).

This speaks to me. Around 2012 or so I had a semi-technical friend (PM, could tell when there was a lot of bullshit being thrown around but not a dev by any stretch) with an idea and he needed a Facebook page/app. Remember this was back when people were building a lot of brand experiences inside of their company's FB pages, and this was similar. I quoted about 30-40k. He got a quote from one of these offshore places for about half that and went with them. 60k in billings and change orders later, he comes to me asking for help. It's an absolute shitshow. Code was terrible, absolutely no organization, no error handling, no logging, obviously not a single test anywhere. It was a pretty stereotypical example of offshore devs trying to do as little as possible to show "progress" while billing day rates because everything now was considered a change. Multi-page emails listing out problems and asking for status on 15 different tickets would get a response 23 hours later of "will look into this quickly thank you :)", etc.

I offered to rewrite the entire thing from scratch for a flat rate 15k and some equity but was turned down. Last I heard they were about 100k in by the time it "launched" and it shuttered maybe 6 months later. So this guy burned 100k but more importantly about 2.5 years of his life on this thing while a bunch of terrible devs and a charlatan CEO made off like bandits.

> "Get back to me, when you know exactly what you want."

This is so important if you want to maintain a good relationship. I'm working with a client who has very little money and while the system he wants is almost trivially simple, he's funding it out of his own pocket. After he initially was bouncing from "cool idea" to "cool idea" and had a heart attack at my very reasonable price, I told him to take a step back and write down the most important features and I'd quote that.

He did that, I built it and he loves it. Now he wants version 2 and we're back to the "wouldn't it be great if..." all over again. Sure, it would, but you already said you can't afford all that crap. Now I'm back to the "stop. Think about what you really need, forget the cool IoT features and focus on the basics then get back to me."

Sorry, needed to vent :-)

You’re a good person that’s awesome. Sometimes it’s necessary to guide people to the water (but ultimately it’s their choice what to do).

>> Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about?

Because people dismiss engineers as low-value, until they painfully realize otherwise. It is the same reason Google/Facebook/Stripe did so well compared to other companies -- because Google/Facebook/Stripe realized the strategic value of engineers and compensated them well and aligned with long-term interests. Other companies cut Engineers and constantly squeezed them until they realized (too late) that they had no strategic power left. The stock market over the past two decades is a fantastic A/B test on people strategy and success.

To be realistic, there is one good reason to outsource dev -- it is to very quickly get a demo-able MVP so you can get funding. You have to recognize that the demo-able MVP is most likely throw-away and you have to be ready to re-build from scratch once you get funding for your own team.

I work at a startup that outsourced its early dev, somehow got sold to a large company.

We had a technical CTO that really wrangled everyone, but he left not soon after we got bought out, dev has been a shitshow ever since.