A fairly common question I hear from non-technical founders is “How do I hire engineers to build my app?” Although many are experts at marketing, sales or a specific subject area, many founders need help designing and building their web or mobile apps. While some worry about hiring the wrong talent, others don’t know where to start to find the right technical team. Therefore, here are 5 ways to hire quality engineers to build an app:
From questions such as “How do I choose a company name?” to “What features make a great mobile app?”, we at Alta are here to help you along your startup journey. While many founders struggle with finding and identifying good technical talent, we’ve compiled a list of key things to consider when making the plunge to hire the first technical members of your company.
Here are 5 ways early stage founders can successfully make their first engineering hire:
Many non-technical founders will look for a CTO or founding engineer to help them build their initial prototype. This person will also be responsible for recruiting and vetting the rest of the engineering team. While the best place to start finding a technical co-founder is through reaching out to friends, family and former coworkers with software engineering backgrounds, there are also many founder matching services available. The famous Y-Combinator offers co-founder matching through their Startup School. Many founders also sign up for programs such as OnDeck, DayOne or other accelerators to meet potential cofounders. Finally, there is a new career for fractional CTOs who can provide early guidance to non-technical founders in hiring or managing full time engineers or contractors. Many of these folks will list this title on their LinkedIn profiles and you can reach out to them directly.
The best way to find and vet engineers is through referrals from other engineers. Therefore, one starting point is to go through your LinkedIn or email inbox from the past year and create a list of people in your network who may be a good fit. Reach out to them and ask for a short call or coffee chat to get their feedback on your startup idea and see how they can help. Be flexible about your ask based on their response during your conversation. Do they love your idea and are ready to quit their jobs and join as your full-time CTO? Do they know other engineers who might be interested in working with you? Are they willing to moonlight or work nights and weekends with you to build out your initial prototype? Any of these options could work as a starting point. I’ve heard of founders who have recruited their brother-in-law to build them a mobile app, convinced their college roommate to work with them on nights and weekends or most commonly found a former co-worker who also dreams of working for themselves to join their founding team. Finding the right co-founder is similar to finding the right life partner. Therefore, people you already know and are friends with are likely to be the best source of a technical cofounder.
If no one in your current network is the right fit, another way to find engineers is to cast a wide net and post your job on various online websites. Some of the best job boards to find engineers include AngelList, HackerNews, LinkedIn and Glassdoor. My favorite job board for early stage startups is AngelList. AngelList Recruit has free and paid options to reach 2.3 million users who are interested in working at startups. With the Free option, you can create a job rec and engineers will directly apply to your job posting. AngelList highly recommends that you share the salary and equity range for the position and will only show your job posting in search results if you provide this information. You can also filter out users based on criteria such as US-only or international, on-site or remote and skills or years of experience required. With the paid plans, you can access AngelList's Curate features which offers a dedicated account manager and access to a pre-vetted list of engineers ready to interview. HackerNews is also a great place to find qualified engineers. At the beginning of each month, they offer a recruiting thread where startups can post their job opportunities and get replies quickly from engineers looking to join an early stage company. Finally, traditional job boards such as LinkedIn and Glassdoor also offer free postings and paid promotion of your job; however, it can be more challenging to vet candidates on these traditional job sites for quality and desire to join a startup.
If you have a limited fixed budget, it may be wise to hire an agency or international dev shop to build the first version of your app before hiring a full-time engineering team. Agencies and dev shops often have a lot of experience working with early stage companies and teams that often include project managers and designers as well as developers so it can be a one stop shop to quickly build the first version of your app. The quality and cost of agencies can greatly vary, and therefore I would recommend asking other founders for recommendations of companies they have specifically worked with and would recommend. You must decide what your budget is and if you’re willing to work with teams internationally at odd time zones to make your app dream come true. Many agencies have a minimum monthly cost and you may need to spend $50,000 to $100,000 to build the initial version of your application. If you are on a tighter budget, a few other options include posting on Upwork or Fiverr for lower cost options or hiring a no-code agency that will use tools like Bubble, Webflow or Alta to build your app for you at a much lower rate.
If you’re not ready to hire engineers yet, you may want to start by building a prototype to test your idea with potential users. You can also use this prototype as a more effective way to share your vision with potential co-founders and engineers. There are a number of no-code tools, such as Alta, available that can help you build web and mobile apps. These tools often provide templates, a drag and drop interface and integrations with payment services such as Stripe, data providers such as Airtable and other integrations through partners such as Zapier if you are looking to add these features into your application.
Whether you are looking for a front-end, back-end, full stack or mobile app engineer to build your dream app, persistence is key in finding the right technical talent to build your app. Many companies use a combination of the methods above to build their mobile app. While they may start with a no-code tool to build their Minimum Viable Product (MVP), they may then move on to an agency to build the next iteration of their application and finally raise enough funding to hire a CTO and in-house engineering team.
