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You need a development team to build your product. Maybe you're a non-technical founder starting from scratch, or your current team can't move fast enough. Either way, this decision can make or break your product.
This guide walks you through the entire process of finding a development partner. Most of the examples come from fintech and events platforms because that's where we have the deepest experience, but the framework applies to any startup building complex software.
One important note about scope: this guide assumes you're looking for a partner to build your product from design through deployment. If you just need to hire a few contractors or fill specific roles on an existing team, some of this won't apply to your situation. We're focusing on partnerships where an agency takes meaningful responsibility for delivering your product.
The process takes time. You'll spend weeks doing this properly, not days. But the work you put in now shapes the next six to twelve months of your company. Let's make sure you get it right.
Most founders start looking for development partners too early. This creates problems down the road—misaligned expectations, scope creep, budget overruns, or worse, a product that doesn't solve the problem you set out to address.
Spending time on your foundation before you start conversations with agencies makes everything else easier. You'll have better conversations, get more accurate proposals, and avoid expensive misunderstandings.
You need to articulate what you're building and why it matters. One effective way to do this is through the Foundation Sprint framework created by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky.
This framework forces you to be specific about who you're serving, what problem actually matters to them, and why your approach is different. It also forces you to name your competition. It follows this structure:
If we help [customer] solve [problem] with [approach], they will choose it over [alternatives] because [differentiation].
Here’s what this looks like in practice: “If we help finance teams at SaaS companies match payments from multiple sources, they will choose our solution over spreadsheets and accounting software because it handles subscription billing and reduces month-end close from days to hours.”
It’s not meant to be pretty or marketing-ready, but it clearly captures the core concept of your product.
Figure out where you're starting from. Are you building something completely new, or do you have existing code that needs to be extended or fixed? Partners need to know this upfront, as working with legacy code requires extra planning and preparation.
List out the integrations you know you'll need. Payment processors, third-party APIs, existing internal systems, analytics tools—whatever connects to your product. Some integrations are straightforward and take a few days. Others will eat up weeks of development time.
Define key technical requirements:
If you're not sure about your technical requirements, that's completely fine. A good partner will help you figure this out during discovery. But they need to know what you don't know so they can plan time to work through it with you.
Development can take more time and cost more than you might expect. Knowing this upfront makes it easier to plan and helps avoid surprises down the road.
Costs depend on project complexity, risk, and the team you hire. Location affects cost, collaboration, and communication:
How you pay for development also affects flexibility and control. Fixed-price contracts give predictable costs but little room to adjust if requirements change. Time-and-materials models charge for the work actually done, which makes it easier to iterate or adapt priorities but requires active management. Dedicated team models fall in between: you reserve a team for a set period—often full-time—giving you more control than fixed-price contracts while keeping costs predictable, and letting you adjust priorities as you learn during the project.
Teams also differ along a boutique ↔ factory spectrum. Boutique teams are smaller and senior, providing high-touch collaboration and product input. Factory-style teams focus on standardized delivery pipelines for throughput and efficiency. Most vendors fall somewhere in between.
Even a simple MVP usually takes several months to build. Projects with complex integrations, real-time features, or strict compliance requirements take longer due to architecture, testing, and audits. Be cautious of promises for extremely fast delivery—these often mean corners will be cut.
To plan effectively:
Finally, budget for iteration, not just launch. The first release rarely solves every problem—real users expose gaps and new priorities. Reserve a portion of your budget and time for post-launch improvements so you can respond quickly to feedback instead of being locked into version one.
Working with an external development partner requires steady involvement from your team. They need timely decisions, feedback, and approvals to keep progress moving. If engagement is inconsistent, even a strong agency will slow down as questions wait and assumptions fill the gaps.
Set expectations around decision-making before work starts. Agree on who can approve scope or approach changes, who can sign off on smaller feature or design choices, and how quickly decisions are usually made.
Maintain a regular meeting rhythm and treat it as part of the build. Weekly reviews and short alignment calls help catch issues early and adjust direction while changes are still inexpensive.
Also clarify what happens after launch. Whether you plan to bring development in-house, continue with the partner, or transition to another team should be discussed early, since it influences documentation depth, code structure, and handoff planning. The same goes for support expectations.
Write all of this down. The format doesn't matter—a Google doc works fine. This document serves two purposes.
First, it forces you to think through your project more clearly. You'll discover gaps in your thinking, contradictions in your requirements, or assumptions you haven't validated. Writing exposes these issues while they're still easy to address.
Second, it gives development partners the information they need to have a thorough conversation with you. They can ask specific questions about your integrations, understand your compliance needs, and give you an actually useful estimate instead of a wild guess.
Your foundation document should include:
You don't need everything figured out before you start talking to partners. If you can explain what you're trying to build, why it matters, who it's for, and what constraints you're working within, that's enough to have productive conversations. Partners can help you refine the details.
Sometimes you know the problem you want to solve but not the technical solution or realistic scope. Discovery sprints help bridge that gap.
These short, focused engagements—often one to two weeks—bring together developers, designers, and product strategists to clarify requirements before full development. Many agencies offer them as standalone services. The cost is usually a fraction of the full project, typically $5K to $30K depending on complexity.
A good discovery sprint follows a structured process. The output is a usable document: prioritized features with effort estimates, recommended architecture, timeline and milestones, budget range, risks with mitigation strategies, and usually design concepts or wireframes.
Discovery isn’t always necessary. If requirements, scope, and technical approach are already clear, you may skip it. Even without a formal sprint, strong partners will spend meaningful time asking questions, challenging assumptions, and working through requirements before coding begins.
A note on timing: Discovery comes after your foundation work but before committing to full development. Think of it as: foundation work defines what you’re solving, discovery figures out how to build it, and development actually delivers the solution.
You know what you need to build. Now you need to figure out what makes a development partner capable of building it well.
Having generic software experience isn’t enough for complex products. When you talk to potential partners, ask for concrete examples of similar work: its scope, challenges, and solutions.
Vague statements like “we’ve done lots of payment integrations” don’t tell you much. Specifics, such as “we integrated Stripe Connect for a marketplace, ran into webhook reliability issues under high volume, and built a reconciliation system to catch missed events,” show real experience.
Be cautious of agencies claiming expertise in every industry. True expertise is specific. Agencies that say they’re equally strong in fintech, healthcare, logistics, e-commerce, and gaming are likely generalists—they can execute, but they’ll be learning on your dime. That’s fine for simple projects, but for complex or regulated work, specialists are safer.
That said, perfect industry experience isn’t always necessary. Agencies that have built complex SaaS or secure systems in other domains can often adapt quickly, even if they haven’t worked in your exact vertical. What matters most is that they understand the challenges you’ll face and can handle them responsibly—not just that they have the “right” logo in their portfolio.
The specific technologies don’t matter as much as whether the team can build what you need. They should also be able to explain their choices in plain language.
For web applications, you'll hear about React, Vue, Angular, or Svelte for the frontend. For mobile, it might be React Native, Flutter, or native iOS and Android development. For backend systems, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, Ruby, or similar. The specific framework matters less than whether they can explain why it's a good fit for your project.
A good answer sounds like: "We're recommending React for your frontend because you need a dynamic, responsive interface and we can share components between your web and mobile apps. We considered Vue, which would work fine, but our team has deeper React expertise and can move faster with it." That's honest and specific.
A bad answer sounds like: "We use React because it's the best frontend framework." No framework is universally best: everything involves tradeoffs. Partners who can't articulate tradeoffs probably haven't thought through your specific needs.
If you need to scale, the team should be comfortable with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. More importantly, they should know how to use them effectively. Can they set up auto-scaling so your infrastructure grows with demand and shrinks when traffic drops? Do they understand load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple servers? Can they architect systems that handle sudden spikes without falling over?
For an events platform expecting ticket sales to spike when doors open, this is critical. For a financial product that needs to be available 24/7, reliability and redundancy matter. Ask how they've handled infrastructure for similar needs.
Most products connect to other services—payment processors, email systems, analytics tools, CRM platforms. These integrations often take more time than founders expect because external APIs have quirks, rate limits, and occasional downtime that you need to handle gracefully.
Ask for examples of complex integrations they've built. How did they handle failures in external services? What happens when Stripe's API goes down for ten minutes—does your entire product break, or do you queue transactions and process them when service returns?
Security should be part of the design from the start, especially for fintech, healthcare, or any product handling sensitive data. A strong partner brings it up naturally—encryption, authentication, access control, and secure session handling shouldn’t need to be prompted. For regulated industries, they should understand the relevant compliance frameworks.
It’s also worth asking how they maintain security during development: Do they follow secure coding standards, scan for vulnerabilities, or conduct audits or penetration testing? Experience with these practices indicates they can build systems that meet both practical and regulatory requirements.
Good teams verify their code through multiple types of testing. Unit tests check individual components work correctly. Integration tests ensure different parts of your system work together. End-to-end tests simulate real user flows. Performance tests check if your system handles expected load. Security tests probe for vulnerabilities.
Ask about their QA process: who runs the tests, what coverage they aim for, and how they balance thorough testing with speed. Testing takes time and resources, but catching issues early is far cheaper than fixing problems in production or dealing with security incidents.
Startups need to move fast, but speed without quality creates expensive problems. Agile development makes sense for most startup projects. Look for partners who work iteratively and show you progress regularly. Ask how they structure sprints or iterations. What happens at the end of each cycle?
Lean teams work in small, testable increments and optimize for fast learning. Look for partners who focus on validation, early user feedback, and measurable outcomes. They should ask what needs to be tested first and what the smallest useful release looks like.
Expect constructive pushback on scope. Good partners protect your time and budget by narrowing work to the highest-value experiments. For example: “Building all ten features will take six months. If we start with three core experiments, we can learn faster and adjust based on real usage.”
Lean execution follows a build → measure → learn loop, with each iteration informing the next and keeping progress aligned with real user needs.
Requirements evolve as you learn more about your users and market. You'll get feedback that changes your priorities. You'll discover constraints you didn't know about. Partners who treat any change as a crisis aren't built for startup work. Look for flexibility within reason—not everything can be a last-minute pivot, but good partners know how to adapt.
Ask how they handle scope changes. Do they have a clear process for evaluating impact and adjusting plans? Can they explain the tradeoffs of different approaches? Partners should help you understand what changes are easy to accommodate and which ones require significant replanning.
You need to know who you'll actually be working with, not just who's in the sales meeting. The people who sell you the project often aren't the people who build it, and that gap can create problems.
Ask who will be on your team. You want names, roles, and experience levels. Will you have a dedicated project manager, or will the lead developer manage the project? Who's the lead developer, and what's their background? How many developers will work on your project, and what are their specializations? Will you have a dedicated designer, or is design handled separately?
Ask how much of each person's time is allocated to your project. Are they full-time dedicated, or working on your project part-time alongside others? Part-time allocation isn't necessarily bad, but it should match the timeline promises. If they're promising aggressive timelines with a part-time team, the math doesn't work.
Find out what happens if someone leaves during the project. Team changes happen—people quit, get sick, have emergencies. How does the agency handle transitions? Do you get approval over replacements? Is there overlap for knowledge transfer?
How often will you have check-ins? The specific cadence matters less than having a clear system and sticking to it. What format do check-ins take? Video calls, written updates, async messaging? What tools do they use for project management—Jira, Asana, Linear, Trello, something else? The specific tool matters less than everyone using it consistently. You should be able to see what's in progress, what's coming next, and what's blocked.
Ask about their response time expectations. How quickly do they typically respond to questions? Same day? Within a few hours? This sets realistic expectations. If you need rapid turnaround on decisions and they normally respond within 48 hours, there's a mismatch.
Time zone differences are manageable with the right approach. Many successful partnerships span significant gaps—European and Asian agencies work effectively with US clients when both sides establish clear communication practices.
If your teams operate in different time zones, ask potential partners how they’ve managed time differences with past clients. Do they follow established processes for cross-time-zone collaboration? Can their team adjust working hours to ensure overlap during critical project phases? What are their typical response times for questions, and how do they handle urgent issues to make sure they’re resolved quickly?
The key is understanding how the agency structures communication across time zones and whether their approach matches what your project requires. Projects needing frequent real-time collaboration benefit from more overlap, while those with clear requirements and structured milestone reviews can work effectively with less.
You’ll be working closely with this team for months, so communication style matters. Pay attention to how they explain things. Do their answers make sense to you, or do you leave conversations more confused than when you started?
Strong partners also communicate with honesty and confidence. They challenge your assumptions constructively, point out technical risks, and suggest better approaches when they see opportunities. That kind of pushback is usually a sign they’re thinking about outcomes, not just delivery.
In early conversations, strong partners tend to ask more questions than they answer. They focus on understanding your business, your goals, and your users before talking about solutions. They want to know why you’re building this, who it’s for, and what success looks like. Teams that jump straight to “we can build that — here’s the price” are often moving too fast to fully understand what you actually need.
You know what you need and what to look for. Now comes the actual work of finding and vetting partners. This takes time—expect to spend several weeks doing this properly.
Start by building a list of potential partners. The goal is to identify 3-5 agencies worth having in-depth conversations with.
The best source is referrals from other founders. Ask people in your network who've actually worked with development agencies. Be specific in how you ask. Explain what you're building and what matters to you. If budget is tight, say so. If timeline is critical, mention that. This helps people recommend agencies that actually fit your needs.
Use directories like Clutch, but read critically. These platforms aggregate reviews and portfolios, which is useful for discovery. But treat reviews with appropriate skepticism. Look for patterns in feedback, not just star ratings. What do multiple reviews say about communication? About meeting deadlines? About handling problems?
Portfolio evaluation for non-technical founders: When looking at agency websites and portfolios, you're trying to assess two things: Have they built products similar to yours in complexity and domain? Can you verify that what they built actually works and gets used?
Make your shortlist: After researching, narrow down to 3-5 agencies that seem like potential fits. They should have:
This shortlist is who you'll have detailed conversations with. If you can't find 3-5 that meet basic criteria, expand your search or adjust your requirements. If you have more than 5 strong candidates, prioritize based on referral strength and portfolio relevance.
The first conversation with each potential partner reveals how they think, work, and communicate. Share your foundation document beforehand so they have context, and prepare questions based on their portfolio and your specific needs. These calls typically run 45 minutes to an hour.
Strong agencies spend at least half the call understanding your needs before discussing their services. They ask about your users and their problems, your definition of success, and how you'll measure whether the product is working. This focus on your business goals before technical solutions signals genuine partnership thinking. Notice whether they ask clarifying questions or jump straight to pitching their process and technologies.
When discussing their experience with similar projects, push for specific examples rather than general claims. Ask what technical challenges emerged and what they'd do differently with hindsight.
Be direct about your budget, timeline, and constraints. Strong partners work with you to find approaches that fit rather than promising unrealistic outcomes to close the deal. Ask how they'd approach your project—you're looking for high-level reasoning and priorities, not a detailed plan. Their initial recommendations should reflect understanding of your specific needs, not generic best practices.
By the end of the call, you should understand their relevant experience, general approach, who you'd work with, and typical process. Detailed pricing usually requires more discussion, but you should have a sense of whether you're in the same ballpark on budget expectations.
After your conversations, agencies will send proposals. Good proposals take time to put together because they're customized to your project.
What a complete proposal should include:
You'll likely receive proposals with different prices, timelines, and approaches. Here's how to compare them meaningfully.
Don't compare on price alone. The cheapest option usually means corners are being cut somewhere—rushed development, junior team, minimal testing, poor documentation, or hidden costs that will come later. The most expensive option isn't necessarily the best either—sometimes agencies charge premium prices based on reputation rather than actual fit for your project.
Compare on value and fit. Consider:
Look for proposals that match what you actually said in conversations. If the technical approach doesn't make sense or the timeline seems off, ask about it. Good partners welcome these questions and provide direct, helpful answers.
Before committing to full development, consider starting with a smaller engagement. Two approaches work well for reducing risk while testing the partnership.
Discovery sprints work best when your requirements aren't fully clear or you want validation before committing significant resources. You work with the agency team to clarify your product vision, prioritize features, map out architecture, and create realistic timeline and budget estimates. The output is a detailed roadmap you can use to move forward with that agency or evaluate other options.
Pilot projects let you evaluate how a partner actually works by building something real. You might build your authentication system, a single core workflow, or one significant integration—something substantial enough to assess code quality, development speed, and collaboration, but contained enough that it's not a major investment if things don't work out. This approach works best when you're uncertain about a partner who seems promising, or when your project has significant technical unknowns you want to validate before full commitment.
When to start small
Either approach makes sense when you're not fully confident in your choice, when your project is particularly complex or risky, or when you want to test the working relationship before full commitment. You might even do both—discovery to validate requirements, then a pilot with your chosen partner to validate execution.
When to skip it
If you're very confident based on strong referrals and clear portfolio evidence, smaller engagements might be unnecessary overhead. If timeline pressure requires immediate full development, you may need to move straight into the main project. Some agencies don't offer these structures because their business model is built around full projects.
After all this research, conversations, proposals, and reference checks, you should have enough information to make a confident choice. Rather than trying to keep everything in your head, use a structured approach to compare your finalists. Create a simple scorecard with the factors that matter most to you, weight them by importance, and score each agency.
The numbers might reveal that the agency you liked most actually has weaker technical depth, or that the one with the best portfolio has communication concerns. Use the scorecard to make your intuition explicit and testable.
After systematic evaluation, pay attention to your gut feeling. The right partner should make you feel confident, not anxious. You should feel like they understand your project, respect your constraints, and genuinely want to help you succeed.
That said, verify your gut feeling against objective criteria. Use both your systematic evaluation and your intuition, and make sure they're pointing in the same direction.
If you genuinely can't decide between two finalists who both seem strong, here are some tiebreakers:
Once you’ve chosen a partner, move forward with confidence—you’ve done the work to evaluate them. Trust your decision, but stay involved and attentive throughout the project.
Before signing the contract, make sure next steps are clear: the project start date, what you need to provide, and what they need from you. A smooth transition from selection to execution comes from aligning expectations early.
Choosing the right development partner is one of the most important decisions for your product. The right partner shapes your product, timeline, and outcomes; the wrong one can cost months of frustration and wasted resources.
Framework in brief:
Key principles:
Move forward confidently with a partner who understands your vision, communicates clearly, and genuinely wants to help you build the right product.
Think of us as your tech guide, providing support and solutions that evolve with your product.
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