Questions before building your business on a freelancer

I run Terralien, and I can only speak from my own experiences doing so, since it seems most businesses that have been built mostly by a freelancer or a devshop don't go out of their way to publicize that fact.

Terralien does ongoing development work for six businesses for which we built the original technology. Their degree of success varies, but they all have in common that they're successful enough to have persisted 1+ years and are continuing to make progress. All of them rely on software for their core business to some varying degree, but in none of their cases is the software itself rocket science. It may be moderately complicated and there may be a lot of it, but a good hacker could pick it up without completely derailing the project in the meantime.

On the flipside, Terralien had one very tech-heavy business that we got off the ground, after which they brought development in-house in the form of a developer working for equity. It made total sense for them, since they were doing algorithmic work in the energy space so their technology was in a way "rocket science" and they needed to have that close.

I think anyone considering outsourcing the software build for their startup should look for a freelancer or devshop that is ready and willing to serve as their CTO for the long haul. You want a shop or an individual that understands technology as a tool that should serve the larger business purposes, and not an end in itself. That's the way we try to approach it at Terralien, and it seems to be working really well for our clients.

I wrote this post to give people a different perspective on answering the freelancer vs. dev shop question. We've had a number of entrepreneurs lately asking about the difference between the two and it seemed like a useful way to explain the difference. The value proposition for working with Terralien is very different. We're all about long term relationships with entrepreneurs and helping them build their business rather than just an app. Thanks for the comment and opportunity to clarify that.

Does that change the truth and/or relevance of what they're saying? Sure it's partially an add for Terralien, it's on their domain for crying out loud. But they're still making good points and observations that hold whether or not you ever work with (or even talk to) Terralien.

This is a great point that too many entrepreneurs miss - hoping you didn't personally get burned on this! Unless you're in a partnership where you explicitly want to share IP, it's "works for hire". Good advice to avoid work with any developer (freelancer or otherwise) that doesn't fully and contractually recognize your rights to the IP.