Ask HN: Advice on building freelance teams | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Advice on building freelance teams

6 pointsgmy874 comments

My company (startup, but well-funded) is looking to bring on a team of freelance developers (incl. a tech lead, a two full stacks and a data engineer).

We really want a tight-knit team that has experience working together. They're going to be integrated into the product team. We don't want to cobble together a team and have them shipping things together for the first time.

Any advice on where to go for something like this? Most of the freelance marketplaces don't deliver this.

It feels like there are lots of lean product studios / dev shops that we COULD work with, but we’re struggling to find them.

We DON’T want to go with a shop that's just going to outsource everything overseas, we don't want to have to go through their scrum-master / project manager. That feels like most of what we find on places like Clutch.

Appreciate any thoughts.

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I was able to do this using an agency in Uruguay. Our project was significantly more interesting than others so was basically able to hand select a team for 3 months (front end + 2 back end). I negotiated to not pay/interact With a project manger/designer as we has that in house already.

That said, I don’t think they had a ton of prior working experience together.

If you find any good examples of this present share.

A friend of mine is building this but for full stack product teams so may be worth reaching out https://dreamteams.com/

What you're looking for is pretty hard to find in terms of a marketplace. What you're most likely looking for is just a really good software agency, but it's not always easy to figure out quality. If you're a well-funded startup, I'd maybe reach out to investors/portco network to see if they have good referrals.

Outside of that, the closest marketplace I know of is a.team. They are basically forming software/development/other role teams for you. However, they haven't necessarily worked together before.

And then of course there's the opportunity to acquihire a tiny company, but that's probably way more effort than you're looking for.

Try 10X Management. Disclaimer: 10X Management represents me.

I wrote an article about hiring freelancers that might include some ideas you can use.

https://typicalprogrammer.com/how-to-work-with-freelance-dev...

Free, no ads, affiliate links, trackers, popups, or signup forms.

I assume you've thought this through pretty deeply. But I still have to ask. Why this vs. the traditional route of hiring a few more folks full-time? Especially if you are well funded.

To ask this another way. Is it worth spending an innovation token on how you hire developers?

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