We plan to bring eChai across 100 cities in India. It starts with eChai Startup Demo Day on 26 September, all in person. 13 cities confirmed, 667 founders registered. Any city that reaches 20 interested founders is on too. See your city

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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 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 → 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 → 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 → 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 → 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 →

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