At some point, you want to bring that knowledge in house, the recruiting company will then help you hire people or let you convert some of thier contractors (not thier full time people) to fulltime.
Some will have a combination of onsite developers, “rural source” developers who are in a cheaper part of the US, contractors and outsourced developers but they manage the entire project.
I was offered such a position - the pay is above market but it required too much travel for me now.
Scenario #1 - you are a founder with a great idea, you hire a good software dev lead who then fills out the department. You work with the Dev lead to hash out your plan They organize it and after certain checkpoints, the dev team demos progress. As the founder, you are at the top of the chain making sure that there is a product market fit, and ensuring things are going as planned from a high level.
Scenario #2. You contract with a consulting company. Your project is led by a dev lead/project manager paid by the consulting company and they fill out the team using thier own staff.
They organize the team and after certain checkpoints, the dev team demos progress. As the founder, you are at the top of the chain making sure that there is a product market fit, and ensuring things are going as planned from a high level.
There is no difference in the delegation chain or the risks involved.
The main difference is that you are writing one check to the consulting company and they are paying the contributors and in the other case, you are paying employees individually.
The usual retort is that employees have more loyalty and ownership in the company. No they don’t. The employees at your company, if they are smart, have one eye toward thier next job just like the consultanting company has one eye toward thier next contract.
I have this problem internally at my company. Recruiting have crazy goals (hire 30 developers per month) so they push us to accept whatever they can get.
Sure, we can keep refusing the candidates but at some point you have to accept someone to get the job done. Even if you need to double check everything they do.
The reasons for that are too complex for a small post but believe me, there are many.
Hire a recruiting company. There are recruiting companies that have a staff of full time consultants that will bring in a whole development team and manage the product.
You are replying to a scenario that is just the opposite of my suggestion. The client company is not hiring developers at all. They are contracting out with the consulting company to manage the entire project. The founder is working with a project manager who is employed with the consulting company to develop a product. The recruiting company is doing all of the project management, development, QA, etc. The founder is hopefully coming up with acceptance criteria for the product since it was his idea.
After the project gets off the ground, then the recruiting/consulting company works with the client to develop in house expertise starting with finding a dev manager who hopefully understands the business and the technical and the dev manager works with recruiters to staff up.
You’re not hiring anyone at first. You’re basically outsourcing the entire development project to an outside agency. If you are a non technical founder, this may be the best way to go.
There is a local recruiting/consulting company that has been trying to get me to come work for them directly full time in the role of team lead, I just can’t do the travel right now.