How to Hire Freelancers for Software Development

This article is for: Startup founders developing software products who need to understand when to hire freelancers and external contractors to help with software development

Written by: Alex Senson, Ashley Burton, Tyler Boulanger

<– Back to “How to Make Software Products: Six Options for Startups”

Building a development team is one of the most expensive parts of getting a software startup off the ground when you can’t build the software yourself. Hiring in-house developers requires a lot of financial commitment while outsourcing to a development studio comes with high rates. Because of this, the idea of hiring freelancers to help build your software can be very intriguing. They offer flexible, affordable, and specialized skillsets that can provide a very efficient way to build your software.

However, hiring freelancers comes with advantages and drawbacks, much like any way of getting your software developed. According to a 2018 report by Upwork , more than a third of the American workforce is now freelancing. With qualified programming talent being so difficult to secure for software companies, it seems like a given that this growing pool of contract workers should be taken advantage of.

This article aims to explore whether your software startup should hire freelancers for development and how you should go about doing so. It is broken down into the following questions:

WHAT is the role of a freelance developer?
WHEN should you hire a freelance developer?
WHERE do you find freelance developers?
HOW do you assess freelance developers?
HOW do you compensate freelance developers?
HOW do you manage freelance developers?

We will illustrate these ideas through case studies of companies and founders who work with the Altitude Accelerator network

Case Study: Robyn Halbot from Analyticly
Case Study: Chris Houston from SurfEasy
Case Study: Daniel Ruscigno from ClinicSense

What is the role of a freelance developer?

And what is your role as the client?

Key Takeaway: Freelance developers can fill many diverse roles, providing flexibility to clients looking to hire them. Most freelancers tend to take on small short- or medium-term tasks that are specific to their expertise. As a client, you should provide the technical leadership to assess candidates, define tasks, and track freelancer progress.

The role of a freelancer varies greatly depending on their skillset, experience, client expectations, or their current schedule. Though many freelancers choose to perform a similar task for all of their clients, others instead opt for diverse assignments that interest or challenge them. In general, freelancers perform short- or medium-term work that is specific to their expertise; depending on project size, they may have ongoing tasks with multiple clients. Most freelance work is done remotely, allowing them to work from home or any workspace of their choosing.

Freelance developers work in cooperation with clients that define the requirements of their task. Freelancers are only contractually responsible for completing the exact task specified by their client. Teams of freelancers can also be assembled, either by the client or by freelancers themselves. One of the main appeals of hiring freelancers is their flexibility, as they have been known to undertake both major development roles and smaller programming tasks.

Smaller tasks

Given their affinity to short-term work, freelancers tend to perform smaller tasks for the most part; especially those that are less experienced or enjoy the commitment-free lifestyle of a freelancer. The first part of completing an initial task is providing price and time estimates to the client. Other duties of a freelancer include documenting their work, familiarizing themselves with company standard practices, and consulting with the client about how their task should be performed. Their main role is obviously to complete their programming task according to the specifications outlined in the contract they’ve agreed upon with their client.

Major development roles

Though its occurrence is less common, experienced freelancers can work with clients as a significant member of their development team. This can range actually developing the product to consulting with the business. In certain situations, business hire a freelancer or freelancing team to be completely in charge of developing either a major component of their software, or even the whole software themselves.

When a founder is non-technical and requires advice on developing their software right away, freelance developers can point them in the right direction. This can be used as a short-term fix before finding a technical cofounder. Freelance software consulting comes in several forms:

Requirements analysis: business and customer insights are translated into developer-friendly instructions
Software architecture: Planning the broader design of software components including compatible hardware, programming languages, or technology stack
Technical consultation: Providing insight on the practices involved in developing software including methodologies, programming languages, architecture patterns, etc.

Your role when you hire freelancers

As someone looking to hire freelancers, you can’t completely put responsibility for the development of your software into the hands of contract workers; it is your job to put freelancers in the best position possible to succeed. There are several ways a client can increase the likelihood that a freelance hiring will be beneficial to all involved.

Hire the right freelancer for the right job

It is obviously difficult to perform a task when someone doesn’t have the required skills or experience. Before you hire freelancers, you need to assess whether they are qualified to be doing the task you are assigning. Advice on how to assess freelancers can be found in the “Question 4” section of this article. If you do not have the technical knowledge required to assess their qualifications, you need to have someone on your team who is able to do so.

Clearly define the requirements of the task

When working with freelancers, you should never make the assumption that they will be able to make an adequate software program when your instructions are just “make something that does A, B, and C.” Instructions need to be clear, likely even defined in the contract, to ensure that you and the freelancer are always on the same page. While this greatly increases the likelihood of getting a product meets your expectations, it also makes the job easier on the freelancer. Strategies for defining tasks can be found in the “Question 6” section of this article, or you can read more about speaking the language of developers.

Track their progress

Again, having someone on the team with technical knowledge is integral to hiring freelancers. The progress and quality of their work needs to be checked by someone who knows what to look for. Freelancers cannot be optimized if they aren’t receiving feedback on their work and being told where they need to improve. Strategies for tracking progress can be found in the “Question 6” section of this article.

Be a leader

With your task possibly being one of many on a freelancer’s plate, you shouldn’t be relying on them to have the leadership to motivate themselves and others on the team. Though they can often be treated as more of a third-party service provider, try to include freelancers on the team and give them the same leadership others would receive; this is especially true if the freelancer could be working with you long-term. Strategies for managing freelancers can be found in the “Question 6” section of this article.

Summary: What is the role of a freelance developer?

Role varies greatly depending on experience, skillset, client expectations, or current schedule
Can work alone or as part of a team
Usually perform short- or medium-term work, smaller tasks
Smaller tasks usually involve a specific programming task; also include time and price estimates, documentation, or small consultations
Can sometimes have major development roles; includes programming major component of software or consulting on how to develop software
Your role as a client is to: hire the right freelancer for the right role, define their task clearly, track their progress, and provide leadership

When should you hire freelancers?

Key Takeaway: Freelancers are a fast and cost-effective option for creating an MVP or performing short term, specialized, and well-defined software development projects. If your software is highly complex and at the core of your business value proposition, freelancers should not be solely relied on to build the product; it will require ongoing in-house resources as your business grows and scales in the future.

A popular saying in software development is that it takes twice as long and costs twice as much to develop software compared to what you expect. With that in mind, freelancers are known to offer a more cost-efficient way to get development done. However, many startups find it difficult to trust an external developer with building their software product when their success revolves around it. This section explores situations in which you should or should not trust freelance developers with programming your software.

Do you have technical leadership?

As noted earlier, a significant part of your role as someone hiring a freelancer is to provide them with technical leadership that will oversee their work, make sure they fit into the company’s goals, and fosters success. Without that leadership on board, it is difficult to build productive relationships with freelance developers.

Freelancers require significant guidance and communication throughout the development process, as the work they are doing is largely dependent on customer feedback, the business’ vision, the big-picture architecture of the software, and much more. Without someone that can properly communicate this information to the developer in technical terms, hiring freelancers can lead to a lot of wasted time and resource.

Though it was suggested earlier that freelancers can act as consultants to non-technical clients, allowing a short-term freelancer to guide the vision of your business is unwise. If someone is going to act as your technical lead, they should be committed to the business long-term so that they can maintain the vision consistently throughout the development team as the business grows. In general, a technical cofounder or some kind of long-term in-house developer should be brought in to make long-term decisions for your business, that is unless you can find an experienced freelancer to eventually transition into a technical cofounder role.

Is software technology your company’s core competency?

As much as every startup wants to develop top-notch software, the quality of this software matters much more for some companies than others. High-performing software is able to generate value for any business, but some businesses create most of their value through other means, such as customer services, marketing, or convenience. These companies rely less on creating the most advanced technology and focus their efforts on the areas that are important to them. On the contrary, companies that create most of their value by developing a novel, complex software solution rely heavily on the quality of their products.

Therefore, it is important to assess whether the software your company wants to produce will be a core competency.

Yes, innovative software is a core competency

When a developing software technology is one of your startup’s core competencies, you are likely creating a brand-new, complex, and sophisticated product that is unlike anything developed before. This means that freelancers will obviously not be experts at working on your technology. Although this inexperience can be overcome by someone hired long-term to work at the company, since they will be devoted to becoming an expert on your technology, the brief and unfocused nature of a freelancing role would not allow them to have this same devotion.

Freelancers may also struggle to see how their task fits into the big-picture vision of the company. This can lead to work that is not consistently aligned and cohesive with other projects at the company.

If you hire freelancers to develop a significant portion of an important software solution, this can lead to a lot of wasted time and resources down the line. A significant aspect of the developer role is coding according to the company’s standards, showing other developers how to use the code, and fixing the code as issues arise. As a freelancer, it is difficult to perform these duties when they are working on a short- to medium-term basis. As a result, code written by freelance developers often needs to be rewritten, eliminating the cost benefits of hiring a freelancer in the first place.

In general, startups developing software as a core competency should hire freelancers for short-term tasks that require a unique expertise not currently held on the development team. Freelancers provide the flexibility that allows specific skillsets to be added to and subtracted from the team as needed, given their skillset does not need to be hired long-term. Freelancers can also be useful if they do make a long-term commitment to the company, but this usually leads to them being hired in-house.

Software is necessary, but not a core competency

When the software your startup is developing is not a core competency, there has likely been a similar product produced in the past and its value is secondary to some other service or competency your company provides. You don’t need to be spending heavy resources on development when your software is only serving as a simple platform for the service you provide or mimicking the functionality of another product. When this is the case, you maybe able to find a freelancer with experience working on a similar project who is able to apply your instructions to a simple task.

If your business’ priority is just getting the product to market quickly, rather than getting a high-quality product to market, hiring a freelancer or team of freelancers is quicker than hiring and onboarding in-house developers for the project. With freelancers, you have the flexibility to grow or shrink the team as needed during development, a convenience you can’t make as much use of when your focus is software complexity.

If you project is very simple, let’s say it’s a webpage for people to share pictures of hamsters, you could find a freelancer to handle development on their own. Code quality and maintenance are still concerning, however, if you plan on changing, upgrading, or growing the project with other developers in the future.

What stage of development are you at?

Developing a quick MVP for validation or a simple quick-fix product

Before commencing the development of a software business venture, validating customer interest in your product is integral; in other words, you should want to build an MVP before you commit to searching for a technical cofounder. If you don’t have the technical skills to do this yourself, one option is to hire freelancers to build the MVP for you.

When you just want a simple software product, whether it’s an MVP or a quick-fix software solution, a freelance developer can be hired to build it for you. When you don’t plan on building on the product later on, the issues involved in using incompatible freelancer code can be avoided. If you do change your mind and decide to scale this business, you need to be aware that you would likely need to completely restart development with whoever takes over programming; keeping that freelancer on your team long-term is another option.

If the MVP is just being used for customer validation and not as an actual product, its code can be imperfect since you will likely not be using it in a full market launch. Freelance MVP development can also be used as a way to bootstrap the development of a full software product, or as a trial of the freelancer’s ability when considering whether to hire them for larger tasks.

Developing an MVP that could grow into your final product, or beginning development of the final product

Due to the short-term nature of freelancing work, freelancers should not be used to build the foundation of your software startup vision. When development is just commencing, code should be produced by someone that is committed to the business long-term, seeing as their code will need to be used and maintained by other developers in the future. Even if you want to give freelancers a smaller task that contributes to your initial product, be wary that if they leave and their code is low quality you will end up needing to rewrite it.

In general, avoid assigning freelancers to develop a significant portion of your product if you plan to scale it in the future; that is unless you can get a long-term commitment out of them. Restrict their role to building a temporary MVP or specialized, discrete tasks.

Expanding your software technology

Freelancers are most effective when they are working on short-term, stand-alone specialized tasks. As the business grows, they can be brought in to provide skills that the rest of the development team doesn’t possess. They can also be brought in as a trial to eventually join the team long-term.

If freelancers made significant contributions to your software before expanding, make sure they maintain a relationship with the company as it continues to grow and update its products; they may need to be consulted on the code they have written. As stated earlier, short-term freelancers should not be used to build a part of your product that is expected to be built upon later on.

As a result, their role as the business grows should be to join the team on tasks where specialized skillsets are required for a short time; they could even be hired as full-time employees. By the time a business is scaling, its vision, culture, and standard practises have been established, so onboarding and offboarding contract developers is much easier. Development decisions by freelancers should not be guiding the future direction of a business, but supplementing the team with additional knowledge that is only temporarily required.

Summary: hire freelancers when:

You have technical leadership on your team that can assess, onboard, and manage freelancers
You need to build an MVP that can later be remade after validation
You need them to perform short-term, highly defined tasks with a unique skillset
You want to develop quick, simple software products and software is not your company’s core competency
You are short on time or funds
You want to work with developers from around the world

Summary: don’t hire freelancers when:

You lack the technical leadership to guide them
You need them to develop a significant portion of your software product
You need someone to guide the long-term vision of your business, unless you plan for them to transition into a technical cofounder role

Where do you hire freelancers for software development?

Key Takeaway: Freelance developers can be met in your network or in person, but most are found through online freelancing sites. These platforms give access to millions of freelancers and can accommodate a wide variety of project sizes and types.

Look at your network

Though you may end up searching through several settings very unfamiliar to you, a great place to start with is the one that’s right in front of you — finding talent in your network! Though you’re probably already aware if your friends or family would be able to help you out, you can extend the search to former coworkers, people you’ve met at conferences, or even people you’ve interacted with online.

Reaching out to those in your network for referrals to freelancers they’ve worked with is also an effective way to find trustworthy labour. LinkedIn is the most common platform used to reach out to your network when you’re in need of introductions or referrals to those that would be a good match for your business

Meet developers in person

Though most freelance developers will work remotely, it is much easier to make a trusting connection with someone in person than through a computer screen. This is usually done by attending tech meetups, where developers meet to discuss the latest tech trends and socialize. You can also invite a freelancer you’ve found online to meet in person if they are comfortable with it and work locally.

Use freelancing websites to hire freelancers

The majority of freelance developers are found using various online platforms. There is a vast range of services to choose from, ranging from general recruiting to highly-specific niche sites. Though they all serve the same purpose, the top freelancing websites go about their business in ways that make them unique from the others.

There are several considerations to keep in mind when deciding on which freelancing services to use. While having a large user base is obviously important, you also want to consider how well the website favours what you’re looking for; some websites work better for short-term projects while others supply freelancers of a certain skillset. Other features to look for include: technical screening of freelancers, project management assistance, and a secure payment process.

Top five general freelancing websites

1. Upwork

Two of the most prominent freelancing platforms, oDesk and Elance, merged in 2013 to form Upwork. With over 12 million freelancers and 5 million clients using it each year, Upwork is one of the largest networks available to hire freelancers. It provides a very user-friendly experience all the way from posting to payment. The platform allows you to pay freelancers on an hourly or per-project basis and is open to practically any kind of freelance work.

After you post your job, developers send you a proposal with their skills, experience, and preferred compensation; you can then compare profiles, feedback, and portfolios between applicants. Upwork offers a free plan for businesses, where all you need to pay is the compensation agreed upon with the freelancer as well as a small administration fee (~3%); there are also paid plans for businesses that want more support.

Upwork Plans 1024x172, Altitude Accelerator

The high amount of proposals you will receive on Upwork tends to reduce the cost of labour. It also offers a secure and easy-to-use payment platform. Upwork freelancers are not heavily vetted, though the site gives you access to past feedback and scored from online skills tests.

Advantages:

Massive pool of talent to choose from
Lower prices
Flexible to different project types
Secure payment process