Ask HN: Any experience with hiring agency to build your MVP?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26411626

by JohanCutych • 5 years ago

9 9 5 years ago

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comprev3• 5 years ago

Not hired one directly but I joined a team during the transition from agency to in-house. The transition took 3 months for us to be self-supported as the platform came with zero documentation.

Due to politics the MVP had 2 false starts at other agencies before the third company built it in a crazy short timeframe. The third company was only going to built Android/iOS apps to an API specification provided to them, but ended up doing the entire backend too.

The false starts were down to lack of clear guidance as to _what_ the client wanted from the agency and very slow feedback loops regarding progress. The first attempt was absolute overkill (and very slow velocity), the second attempt was nothing like the intended idea and development stopped after 12 months. Runway was getting shorter so third agency built it.

The biggest mistake was the client hiring a fresh junior as their first in-house developer, and them not having sufficient experience to identify parts of the platform that would become obvious scaling problems. Later on these became very expensive problems!!

JohanCutych3• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Just to understood, the team you joined was at what stage when they hired the agency? Like was it completely new startup that had capital but not enough man-power?

How big the MVP was? From what I understand it seems more like full blown product that the company wanted to develop?

comprev3• 5 years ago

A company which had existed in the digital music realm and realised it was late to the streaming party. The company was about 15 in size with zero tech people. I understand capital was raised exclusively for the MVP.

The MVP being built was the foundation for a totally new direction the company was heading. The team I joined was the beginning of transition from agency to in-house, and we had to convert this scrappy MVP into production ready to handle 1000s of customers.

The agency built a wooden bicycle which we had to convert into metal...while still riding it :-)

bramkrom2• 5 years ago

Writing from the Netherlands so advice might differ per country. I've worked with about 5 startups who had at least a part of their product built externally. There are three outcomes from your MVP being built externally: 1. It works, which for the moment is great. So you ignore the product and focus on mkt & sales. Because you need revenue. 2 years down you realise you need to start improving stuff, but find yourself limited because you can't change the code and don't really understand how anything works. Then you need to spend couple months raising funds to rebuild the product OR finding a technical founder. Quite the momentum killer. Not so great. 2. The result from your MVP (assuming you're using it to test something) is meh - mediocre, maybe, perhaps. People like this but don't like that. This has the biggest odds of happening. The thing that sucks here is that the learnings are probably your own, because the agency would ask you to pay way more if they'd be involved in all the user testing etc, because that's how their business model works. Translating them to your agency again has the odds of miscommunication or misinterpretation, which is why YCs credo is 'talk to users, write code' - just because you probably need to run through this feedback loop 5-10 times before you get it right. So, outcome also not so great. 3. Your initial target customers tell you the MVP really doesn't do the job and you either end up abandoning the MVP or starting to look for another problem to solve with it. Also really not outcomes you're looking for.

So yes - experience with hiring agency - all negative.

Given you're asking for an MVP I'd suggest you make it smaller. There are tons of ways to learn about your customers' problem and whether you can solve it for them without writing code. We've built landing pages using Keynote which we then tested with customers, ran entire processes that were supposed to be automated manually, and even prototyped a machine learning algorithm by manually coming up with our best guesses for a users' search query. Because the purpose wasn't scientific validation, the purpose was learning. All these three we built in a day. For more: https://hackernoon.com/the-mvp-is-dead-long-live-the-rat-233... http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

JohanCutych3• 5 years ago

Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson!

Few questions to understand the context. At what stage were the startup you worked with mostly?

Did you ever encountered a "proper" hand-off of the MVP? If so, what was it like or what would you suggest?

I guess the idea for me is to have the MVP developed based on getting angel investment and start looking for PMF together with already looking for seed and tech co-founder & inhouse tech team and then after you find the PMF rebuilding it completely anyway.

But you are right that finding PMF is continuous process and might take years and many iterations and the big question is what kind of answers you can get from 1 MVP/prototype built in 3 weeks or so (it should not take longer than that as I agree with what you say - make it as small as possible)

p.s. thanks for the articles, great reading. I agree that before MVP there should be prototypes that validates the hypothesis.

I was inspired by this article btw. https://www.groovehq.com/blog/technical-co-founder

bramkrom2• 5 years ago

Sorry, totally missed this. In case it's still relevant: Stages were all before 500k revenue. So maybe the very successful ones did have their mvp built by someone else, but I just didn't encounter them. As far as proper hand-off concerns - yes, I've seen companies usually deal professionally with their hand-off. That's what their reputation depends on. But the idea of the MVP is not necessarily the product - it's more the first attempt at seeing if you can solve something. Next steps are usually hard to follow up. Seeing as you just do the minimal, you leave out so many things that later on it's just hard to improve on it. I'd want my co-founder to be part of all the initial learning, and so would rather stay put in my job and find a passionate co-founder first before having someone build the mvp. good luck!

comprev3• 5 years ago

My experience was in NL too and agree with all your points.

After the _second_ botched attempt I don't understand why building in-house was decided - instead the company inherited a super rushed barebones MVP with zero docs and spaghetti code...

rl3• 5 years ago

I just wanted to say I accidentally flagged this on mobile. It instantly disappeared, so it took about an hour to get to a desktop PC, manually go through all recent Ask HN posts via Algolia and finally determine I'd flagged this submission.

Despite unflagging and upvoting, I still don't see this in the ask section again. Certainly didn't mean to negatively impact your question's progression. Hopefully @dang or @sctb can restore its position.

Very sorry about that!

JohanCutych3• 5 years ago

Haha, it was probably meant to be! Thanks for dropping in and letting me know. And thanks for the effort of trying to fix it! Appreciate it!

Ask HN: Any experience with hiring agency to build your MVP?

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