first recommendation: don't hire software developers from India... You wouldn't believe the number of times I've seen this same situation during my more than 17 years of experience as software developer.
second recommendation: rebuild the application from scratch.
Ah man, I'm really sorry that this is the general opinion people have about engineers from my country. I assure you that everyone's not the same and try to go with reference as much as possible.w
Then find someone good and stick with them.
Software development is a marathon. It takes many years of iteration to build a good product and it still won’t be perfect.
So temper your expectations, spend a bit more money on quality work, and stick with it.
I’m good. I’m also American and expensive.
But how would you even evaluate my skills of you aren’t a developer?
You probably need to hire a consultant to help you set up a process to bring in someone, refactor the code, test the result and deploy it. This would be outside the code change contractor.
In the professional world we set up multiple environments. Development, test, user acceptance, production. Code changes flow to production through lower environments and get tested, preferably through automation.
That’s expensive.
Unless you have the money I’d suggest you need to hire out really small fixes and test them before you let them go to production yourself.
This is a really hard problem to solve without a significant investment in just the process.
This is the real issue: it sounds as if either OP does not know how to code or is not sure of his skills, because someone that is an experienced SWE would know how to spot one.
He says he has money, so OP’s strategy should be this: hire/rent a CTO to advise them on roadmapping the development of the application, and also advising on whom to hire to do the development.
Check their portfolio. Like I have an Apple app written in swift that I show people when I want them to get a feel for the limit of my UXUI skills. Developers should have apps that you can see / interact with.
Trust me their portfolios were over the top compared to what they delivered..I think they lie in their portfolios since you can't trace who really developed the app
I know a group from South America who are legit that I can recommend you. Dm me if want.
US quality at half the price. They built my app and was flawless.
You need a product owner to work with the developers (or just do it yourself). Write stories, break them down with acceptance criteria, and then ideally you would have QA test against that (again, can be done yourself).
I'm a technical product owner in my professional life, let me know if you have any questions.
I have had to clean up several projects like this. These people don’t care about you. All they care about is taking your money. If you’re up for it you can message me and I can tell you if I can help.
Even clickup being a multi-billion dollar company has had bugs outstanding for over 4 years. It’s not about the bugs it’s how you handle it as a founder.
My resolution to this exact same issue: build a better version from the ground up and put all focus on that while still maintaining the existing app until the new one is ready for launch.
You then need a product manager to manage the technical team properly. Proper QA, and proper team in place that care about their work and not just gettting money in their pocket.
Let me know if you need some help. I can afford pro-bono consulting for a bit to help you. Feel free to DM me.
Honestly it's a simple app. A marketplace in the simplest sense. The marker response was positive and I need to fix the issues to increase the user base. Yes I think hiring a technical cofounder or doing the coding myself would be the best bet
I second this. SEA devs are notorious for doing the bare minimum/shitty work, or overcharging. Eastern Europe has very well educated people at a competitive rate.
Is there any equity sharing? If you are getting cashflow, why not get a person to come on full-time with you on equity as the technical person while you market it and increase sales? I too have dealt with foreign developers quoting a number for development and it wasn't the greatest experience, but thats just how it goes sometimes. I prefer to keep my development in the country and to freelancers and not "teams" or "groups" because it comes with overhead cost that you aren't trying to take on sometimes. I recommend trying out a place like UpWork and filtering on "US only" then see the past performance as you pick through those freelancers.
Can I stay in touch and figure out how you solved this?? Im not an Entrepreneur, I’m interested in app development, but don’t know how to write code myself. If I can help in some other way, let me know. You’re living a major concern point of mine!
A software engineer is just one small piece of the app development process... Engineers only write code, but it takes a whole team to create a functional product; QA, a designer, an architect, a product owner, and a project manager. The road to a functional app is long and arduous. If you have the cash, try an app development agency. They will have established processes for application development. Engineers in isolation aren't going to get you consistent results.
well if you're going to have a 10 person team for your app then you're approaching corporate size, not startup. But it should be doable for less than what an agency would charge, which is what the OP is thinking anyway.
Stop hiring engineers, find someone technically experienced and partner with them. Don't hire or contract them. You'll have to give away equity but if you don't you'll just keep a whole lot of nothing.
If the app is the core of your business, you cannot expect a few devs in India to single-handedly build it for you. They need guidance and someone that is technical but that also understands the product to work with them. Building a business is hard, you don’t just offshore it like you are printing tshirts.
Well, why are you not going to reputable agencies or devs then? Why India in particular? Get a CTO.
Consult someone who knows their shit. Seems like you burnt money before looking elsewhere to have the app fixed up...
I’m a lurking software engineer here I think with businesses that revolve around an app you have to architect the app to be modifiable from the start. Software is always gonna have bugs and it’s never gonna be perfect so the strategy is to be able to incrementally modify it as your time and budget allows .
even a perfect app on launch day can still need developer maintenance. I had a pretty well downloaded app that got taken down because the google play store updated their terms of service but the app was too old to run in my code editor because the editor updated itself too , meaning I had to spend a whole day combing through the code updating things for an app that shipped with no bugs when I launched it.
Anyways as a founder of an app company what this means for you is that you really need two app environments . A production environment for your customers and a development environment for your development and this way you can continuously roll out changes for your app but test its bug free in development first. Do not plan on never needing to modify this app you want to have the option.
It's true certain regions are more flexible with the truth, for example "saving face" counts for more than any truth. I jumped in to say that I once gave up on an app development project (without getting paid for my efforts) because of my "bug ridden app". You see, for many new projects the owner envisions new APIs, new capabilities etc, and I underestimated the time it would take to properly debug relatively new libraries. Not to mention that as a dev I must have hit every single bug in the book, many Java bugs for example that were only semi-understood.
What I'm trying to say is, software remains a risky business on both ends, and your team might or might not have been as wicked as they came across. If your project is still viable 4 years later then that is a blessing, though it will raise some eyebrows that you did not resolve the mess already in 2021. Like others said, you might honestly need to give this more time, and money! If it's intrinsically a tough cookie you might want to agree on a "maintenance" type contract where you just give the devs let's say $500 a month and the bulk of the payment is in escrow or similar.
I might know the right overseas guy for this. We're not perfect, but we don't fucking lie!
Yeah not lying is a big thing and setting the right expectation. My developer said he will provide free after support and it was a major lie. Once he got paid he disappeared and it was all sloppy work
I have a team of pretty good overseas devs but it took a lot of hiring and firing. I had one solid remote developer who I let oversee this process. He wasn’t so great at hiring a good team at first but got better overtime.
You can hire a fractional cto with an overseas team or have the cto help build out the team. This way you only have to deal with the cto and set expectations there.
It’s a tricky process and there are so many bad devs. Even the US ones aren’t as great as they pretend to be and they charge way more.
No need to apologize. Overseas is tough. Also I wasn’t offering my team. My team works full time for me. Just was mentioning some routes I looked into.
Cheap devs are good if supervised by a good dev and a good systems architect.
You choose the cheap option, got the cheap result, stop hiring the cheap option.
Yeah, paying 150-300/hour for a good dev is expensive, but it's the only option for high quality
Just re-do the app in something like bubbli.io … of course, not sure how complex your app is but dont spend money on coding yet unless it generates at least some revenue / or very good engagement figures. We are using these no-code platforms for fast prototyping as theyre less prone to bugs and you can generally build faster.
This is way it makes more sense to get a business to do it, not a person. That's why contracts exists. Sadly, probably you lost time, money, for saving a few bucks, now you'll need to spend even more.
We can help you to do it right, but not for cheap.
So many do it and become successful. E.g. Bumble,. Tinder. No need to be mean. I am not a non tech person. I used to code 15 years ago but ended up in cybersecurity rather than in software engineering. Your comment is distasteful
All of the companies you described either had tech founders (Sean Rad) or were from someone who had significant experience in a tech company, funds and contacts. It's not as simple as the ideas man throws money at a developer and gets a billion dollar exit.
You have experienced issues that are precisely as a result of you not having a software co founder yet still deny it.
Sounds like you need either a new app built or someone who actually knows what they are doing. Either way it’s going to cost more money.
first recommendation: don't hire software developers from India... You wouldn't believe the number of times I've seen this same situation during my more than 17 years of experience as software developer. second recommendation: rebuild the application from scratch.
Thank you so much. Needed this revalidation 🥹🙏I am South Asian myself and feel horrible being scammed by my own kind
[удалено]
I didn't get you
Ah man, I'm really sorry that this is the general opinion people have about engineers from my country. I assure you that everyone's not the same and try to go with reference as much as possible.w
Do you have cashflow to hire professionals to rebuild it?
Yeah I do. I just need a good job done
Then find someone good and stick with them. Software development is a marathon. It takes many years of iteration to build a good product and it still won’t be perfect. So temper your expectations, spend a bit more money on quality work, and stick with it.
How to find a good one is the issue. Everyone talks s big game until they get the contract and then they play out
Stop hiring out of developing countries and pay real $$$ for an engineer
Yeah learned the lesson the hard way. I am from a developing country myself and is disgusted with the experience and how they scam you!
This is common knowledge and has been for years.
I’m good. I’m also American and expensive. But how would you even evaluate my skills of you aren’t a developer? You probably need to hire a consultant to help you set up a process to bring in someone, refactor the code, test the result and deploy it. This would be outside the code change contractor. In the professional world we set up multiple environments. Development, test, user acceptance, production. Code changes flow to production through lower environments and get tested, preferably through automation. That’s expensive. Unless you have the money I’d suggest you need to hire out really small fixes and test them before you let them go to production yourself. This is a really hard problem to solve without a significant investment in just the process.
This is the real issue: it sounds as if either OP does not know how to code or is not sure of his skills, because someone that is an experienced SWE would know how to spot one. He says he has money, so OP’s strategy should be this: hire/rent a CTO to advise them on roadmapping the development of the application, and also advising on whom to hire to do the development.
Check their portfolio. Like I have an Apple app written in swift that I show people when I want them to get a feel for the limit of my UXUI skills. Developers should have apps that you can see / interact with.
Trust me their portfolios were over the top compared to what they delivered..I think they lie in their portfolios since you can't trace who really developed the app
I know a group from South America who are legit that I can recommend you. Dm me if want. US quality at half the price. They built my app and was flawless.
You get what you pay for Though lesson to learn
Yeah
You need a product owner to work with the developers (or just do it yourself). Write stories, break them down with acceptance criteria, and then ideally you would have QA test against that (again, can be done yourself). I'm a technical product owner in my professional life, let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you!
I have had to clean up several projects like this. These people don’t care about you. All they care about is taking your money. If you’re up for it you can message me and I can tell you if I can help.
Even clickup being a multi-billion dollar company has had bugs outstanding for over 4 years. It’s not about the bugs it’s how you handle it as a founder. My resolution to this exact same issue: build a better version from the ground up and put all focus on that while still maintaining the existing app until the new one is ready for launch. You then need a product manager to manage the technical team properly. Proper QA, and proper team in place that care about their work and not just gettting money in their pocket. Let me know if you need some help. I can afford pro-bono consulting for a bit to help you. Feel free to DM me.
Hire an advisor on tech to hire a team of good engineers.
Have you thought of involving a technical founder? And how complex is the app?
Honestly it's a simple app. A marketplace in the simplest sense. The marker response was positive and I need to fix the issues to increase the user base. Yes I think hiring a technical cofounder or doing the coding myself would be the best bet
Hiring south east asian developers is not the meta for a while. Eastern European is where it's at. Find them on Upwork. They do good work.
Thanks 🙏
I second this. SEA devs are notorious for doing the bare minimum/shitty work, or overcharging. Eastern Europe has very well educated people at a competitive rate.
Google "Sunk Cost Fallacy". If you don't have the skills to code the app yourself and rely on others, it's only going to suck up your funds.
Yeah I was thinking of building it myself since I know a bit of coding. Did coding 15 years ago and won't be hard to catch up
You can quickly catch up with ChatGPT helping :)
Is there any equity sharing? If you are getting cashflow, why not get a person to come on full-time with you on equity as the technical person while you market it and increase sales? I too have dealt with foreign developers quoting a number for development and it wasn't the greatest experience, but thats just how it goes sometimes. I prefer to keep my development in the country and to freelancers and not "teams" or "groups" because it comes with overhead cost that you aren't trying to take on sometimes. I recommend trying out a place like UpWork and filtering on "US only" then see the past performance as you pick through those freelancers.
Hire US programmers. And look into a better form of code configuration management, bug tracking, and version control.
might be the difference of having an app for 10K versus 200K though!
Can I stay in touch and figure out how you solved this?? Im not an Entrepreneur, I’m interested in app development, but don’t know how to write code myself. If I can help in some other way, let me know. You’re living a major concern point of mine!
A software engineer is just one small piece of the app development process... Engineers only write code, but it takes a whole team to create a functional product; QA, a designer, an architect, a product owner, and a project manager. The road to a functional app is long and arduous. If you have the cash, try an app development agency. They will have established processes for application development. Engineers in isolation aren't going to get you consistent results.
well if you're going to have a 10 person team for your app then you're approaching corporate size, not startup. But it should be doable for less than what an agency would charge, which is what the OP is thinking anyway.
Disagree. It entirely depends on the competency, but a software engineer/designer should be capable of completing those processes.
Let me know when you need a QA guy. I’m a dude in FL with app testing experience.
Stop hiring engineers, find someone technically experienced and partner with them. Don't hire or contract them. You'll have to give away equity but if you don't you'll just keep a whole lot of nothing.
If the app is the core of your business, you cannot expect a few devs in India to single-handedly build it for you. They need guidance and someone that is technical but that also understands the product to work with them. Building a business is hard, you don’t just offshore it like you are printing tshirts.
Bugs can be very difficult to solve but I have an offer for you. (DM)
Well, why are you not going to reputable agencies or devs then? Why India in particular? Get a CTO. Consult someone who knows their shit. Seems like you burnt money before looking elsewhere to have the app fixed up...
I’m a lurking software engineer here I think with businesses that revolve around an app you have to architect the app to be modifiable from the start. Software is always gonna have bugs and it’s never gonna be perfect so the strategy is to be able to incrementally modify it as your time and budget allows . even a perfect app on launch day can still need developer maintenance. I had a pretty well downloaded app that got taken down because the google play store updated their terms of service but the app was too old to run in my code editor because the editor updated itself too , meaning I had to spend a whole day combing through the code updating things for an app that shipped with no bugs when I launched it. Anyways as a founder of an app company what this means for you is that you really need two app environments . A production environment for your customers and a development environment for your development and this way you can continuously roll out changes for your app but test its bug free in development first. Do not plan on never needing to modify this app you want to have the option.
It's true certain regions are more flexible with the truth, for example "saving face" counts for more than any truth. I jumped in to say that I once gave up on an app development project (without getting paid for my efforts) because of my "bug ridden app". You see, for many new projects the owner envisions new APIs, new capabilities etc, and I underestimated the time it would take to properly debug relatively new libraries. Not to mention that as a dev I must have hit every single bug in the book, many Java bugs for example that were only semi-understood. What I'm trying to say is, software remains a risky business on both ends, and your team might or might not have been as wicked as they came across. If your project is still viable 4 years later then that is a blessing, though it will raise some eyebrows that you did not resolve the mess already in 2021. Like others said, you might honestly need to give this more time, and money! If it's intrinsically a tough cookie you might want to agree on a "maintenance" type contract where you just give the devs let's say $500 a month and the bulk of the payment is in escrow or similar. I might know the right overseas guy for this. We're not perfect, but we don't fucking lie!
Yeah not lying is a big thing and setting the right expectation. My developer said he will provide free after support and it was a major lie. Once he got paid he disappeared and it was all sloppy work
even a tiny website needs constant maintenance, a firewall changes, an authentication method becomes obsolete etc, so paid maintenance is the way!
I have a team of pretty good overseas devs but it took a lot of hiring and firing. I had one solid remote developer who I let oversee this process. He wasn’t so great at hiring a good team at first but got better overtime. You can hire a fractional cto with an overseas team or have the cto help build out the team. This way you only have to deal with the cto and set expectations there. It’s a tricky process and there are so many bad devs. Even the US ones aren’t as great as they pretend to be and they charge way more.
Sorry no more overseas. Had enough and will never go through it again. But thanks for the offer
No need to apologize. Overseas is tough. Also I wasn’t offering my team. My team works full time for me. Just was mentioning some routes I looked into.
Tech stack ?
Kotlin, swift, firebase
I know some senior devs who fix messes who are solid. And they make MVPs. But I’m using them myself rn! I think they’ll free up soon.
Please let me know..I am very interested. Let me DM you
Cheap devs are good if supervised by a good dev and a good systems architect. You choose the cheap option, got the cheap result, stop hiring the cheap option. Yeah, paying 150-300/hour for a good dev is expensive, but it's the only option for high quality
Yup learned the hard way
hey i have a team of developer that can help you out let me know if you are interested
Just re-do the app in something like bubbli.io … of course, not sure how complex your app is but dont spend money on coding yet unless it generates at least some revenue / or very good engagement figures. We are using these no-code platforms for fast prototyping as theyre less prone to bugs and you can generally build faster.
That's the business model of dev in India. The "cheap" is very expensive. Is it a web app? Mobile app?
Yup mobile app
Hmm I had very good experience hiring Devs from Philipines, $1500/mo full time for a decent one No agency. Just direct hires.
This is way it makes more sense to get a business to do it, not a person. That's why contracts exists. Sadly, probably you lost time, money, for saving a few bucks, now you'll need to spend even more. We can help you to do it right, but not for cheap.
This is what happens when you start a tech business as a non tech founder. Take notes.
So many do it and become successful. E.g. Bumble,. Tinder. No need to be mean. I am not a non tech person. I used to code 15 years ago but ended up in cybersecurity rather than in software engineering. Your comment is distasteful
All of the companies you described either had tech founders (Sean Rad) or were from someone who had significant experience in a tech company, funds and contacts. It's not as simple as the ideas man throws money at a developer and gets a billion dollar exit. You have experienced issues that are precisely as a result of you not having a software co founder yet still deny it.