Finding & working with developers

I'm non-technical, do I actually need a technical co-founder? If you're building a technology product for the long haul, yes: agencies and freelancers are a stopgap, not a foundation, and YC's data shows teams... Beginner 18 resources → How do I actually find a technical co-founder? Treat it like sales, not luck: build a pipeline, expect many nos, and follow up. Go where builders are, hackathons, dev communities, open-source, s... Intermediate 19 resources → Should I hire an agency or a freelancer to build my MVP? Fine for a throwaway prototype or a validation build, risky as the backbone of a product company, you'll own code you can't change and depend on pe... Intermediate 17 resources → How do I hire good engineers in India when everyone's competing for the same talent? Lean hard on your network, alumni, ex-colleagues, referrals, because job portals alone won't surface the best people in India's talent war. Sell th... Intermediate 18 resources → How do I evaluate a developer's skill if I can't code? Skip trivia and whiteboard puzzles; give them a small, paid, job-representative task and see how they think, communicate, and ship. Ask them to wal... Intermediate 19 resources → What equity should I offer a technical co-founder vs. an early engineer? A true co-founder who joins early and shares the risk is usually a near-equal partner, think tens of percent, always with vesting, not an employee ... Advanced 20 resources → How do I write a spec for a developer when I'm not technical? Start by describing what the user does, screen by screen, in plain language, not what the database should look like. Sketch the flows (even on pape... Beginner 19 resources → Should I build my MVP on no-code before I hire any developers? Often yes, if your idea is a workflow, a marketplace, or a form-heavy tool, because no-code lets you test demand for a few thousand rupees before y... Beginner 19 resources → What's a fair way to structure a milestone-based contract with a dev agency? Tie payments to working, demonstrable milestones you can actually see in a browser, not to hours logged or vague phases like "backend complete". Ke... Intermediate 19 resources → How do I make sure I actually own the code my freelancer writes? Get a signed agreement with an explicit "work made for hire" and IP-assignment clause before any code is written, because in many jurisdictions the... Intermediate 19 resources → How much should an MVP realistically cost to build in India? For a focused MVP, expect a wide range from roughly 2 to 15 lakh depending on scope, whether it is web or mobile, and whether you hire a freelancer... Beginner 18 resources → When should I stop using an agency and hire my first in-house developer? Move in-house when the product is core to your business and you are changing it every week, because agency turnaround and context-switching will st... Intermediate 19 resources → How do I keep an offshore or remote dev team accountable across time zones? Accountability comes from visible, small, frequent output, not from status meetings, so insist on a shared board (like a Kanban) and a demo of work... Intermediate 20 resources → What are the warning signs a developer is building the wrong thing? The biggest red flag is silence: weeks of "almost done" with nothing you can click. Watch for a developer who keeps adding infrastructure and "scal... Beginner 20 resources → Is it a mistake to hire one developer to build my whole product alone? For an early MVP, a single strong generalist is often ideal and cheaper than a team, so it is not automatically a mistake. The real risk is the bus... Intermediate 19 resources → How do I hire a developer without a warm network or startup connections? Build a signal instead of relying on referrals: post a small, well-scoped paid trial task and judge people on what they deliver, not their resume o... Intermediate 19 resources → How do I evaluate the code quality of a build I inherited from an agency? Pay an independent senior developer for a few hours to do a code and architecture review before you build anything more on top of it, because the c... Advanced 20 resources → When my technical hire and I disagree on the tech stack, whose call is it? Default to the developer on how it is built, because that is their craft and living with their own choices keeps them accountable, but you get to s... Advanced 18 resources →