Ten Lessons I Learned After Spending $10,000 on Freelancers

“MBA” by doing things

The past year has been one hell of learning. I had not imagined the number of interactions we would experience. I can attach a specific dollar value to what these experiences have cost us and it’s over $10,000. Since my effort is a bootstrapped one, I am always looking to maximize my learning for every dollar spent in this effort.

But, somehow, it feels we are still far from our peak learning pace. As in any story, it is not all rosy — not even, at the wrap-up of the development phase. We continue to struggle with a lot of frustrations involved in product development but there are several silver linings as I discuss below. Some of these learnings might be meaningful to you as either an entrepreneur or a freelancer.

1. Project manager

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker.

When we hired the freelancing team from India for the development of our app, the founder of the freelancer company quoted the price breakdown for each of the contributors. As we are finishing up the project discussion, he adds that he will “toss” in a project manager for free to help manage the project. I laughed, amused that there is very little value associated with the project manager.

During the course of the project though, it turned out the project manager was the most crucial player. His awareness of the various intricacies and details made him very valuable in my mind. He was instrumental in ensuring what I communicated as my requirements were translated properly to the development team. He asked pointed questions, stood his ground during discussions, and was prompt in his responses. These are all good characteristics for any role.

Over the course of the project, I had many interactions — watching him recover from Covid, Dengue, have his first daughter born.

2. Digital artists

Sweeping generalization — there are some really good digital artists from Indonesia on Fiverr. I worked with two of them and they were both good. The first of these artists worked on the Childrens’ book.

Once again, the communication from these freelancers was exceptional. Time and again, a key distinction that shows up is this — all the best freelancers communicate clearly (action-oriented) and timely.

In order to supplement our digital needs, I did try my hand at both Procreate and Canva. I had some good luck creating value out of these two tools but after many hours, the return-on-investment was pretty feeble. These time-consuming efforts only increased my admiration for digital artists.

3. Design

One of the distinguishing factors in our app is that the ‘cards’ we use are designed and drawn by our kids. We wanted to capture the beauty of the small, little imperfections that make them unique.

The card below is an example of the unparalleled creativity that resides in a kid’s mind.

The other aspect of the design was the user interface in the app itself. Compared to what we had done a few years ago (on a different product), the UI looks much cleaner. More professionally done than stitched together like a rag doll.

Have no fear of perfection, you will never reach it — Salvador Dali

There is room for a lot of improvement in the app for UI/UX. Though we captured several edits, we missed certain key pieces. We had to think through the wireframe and mock-ups much more closely (than what we did). The importance of being diligent at the right moment cannot be emphasized enough. We missed this act several times but are starting to get better.

4. Frontend Developers

Apple’s programming language, Swift, has made it much easier to develop a clean-looking UI. I had tried to develop the initial version of fit dollar myself. Each feature that I was trying to add was taking a fair amount of time to write. This was because of my inexperience as well as doing this part-time.

Our freelance developer did a pretty good job translating the wireframe to an actual product. Though I haven’t interacted with him directly, he was able to incorporate many features pretty quickly. One problem is with the ‘calendar’ part of the app which is not native to Swift.

Throughout the development process, the calendar has given us more trouble than it’s worth. Maybe in future versions of Swift, Apple will provide a native UI component for the calendar that can be integrated seamlessly.

5. Backend developers

Our initial efforts of developing the backend for our app were in Firebase. As an amateur programmer, Firebase was sufficient for my needs and skill level. As we move to the professional development team, we moved to a whole set of backend technologies (Node.js, Angular, AWS-Mongo). AWS is supposedly very cost scalable and offers the benefit of being a more generalized solution.

One thing that still freaks me out is the potential of incurring a huge AWS bill through some run-away effect that we haven’t fully factored in. You don’t need a large customer base for this to happen. There have been some stories where small companies and non-profits incurred a 20,000$ bill because of an unintended effect.

During our initial development phase, AWS provided us with a 300$ credit to cover a good amount of ground. Almost all cloud infrastructure companies do that but it was still good to leverage it.

The gamification code that our backend developer has written is quite complex. But, looking through the code structure, it is needlessly complex in many places. Something that we need to address going forward but in a cautious way. We don’t want to introduce run-away effects as we clean up the code.

6. Editors vs. Grammarly

Is there an undercurrent of a fight between real editors and Grammarly? I might be completely off in that it’s not an undercurrent but a direct, full-blown battle. I witnessed part of this angst against Grammarly in one of my posts.

Regardless of what the actual reason was, the conclusion was clear. Our book was good to go. On the editorial side of things, we did notice that Grammarly has been a revelation. Maybe using Grammarly (trial or pro version) is sufficient to clean up your children’s book. For our next installment, We will surely pursue this route — fitdollar

When I had posted an article about how I could clean up my children’s book with the help of Grammarly and that a ‘real editor’ from Fiverr couldn’t help me much, I struck a nerve. A kind editor reached out to me showing me the many flaws I had in my book. I was horrified. She did such an amazing job in fixing the first layer of flaws and did it for free.

I have been converted to the club of hiring a real editor for my future work in the Children’s book area. As I am beginning to do an expanded version of the book, I know exactly who to turn to and who to avoid.

7. Voice over-artists and Animators

In Arvid Kahl’s book “Zero to Sold”, he describes an opportunity where you will find a talent match from your early adopters or followers. This is a powerful and unique combination because these individuals check a lot of the boxes.

One of our followers on Twitter is a highly positive, energetic fitness coach. His posts are always bright and I came to know through Twitter that he does voice-over work on the side. So, when the time came our us to create our app explainer video, I reached out to him. His voice works very well as you can check in the animation video below.

Another great voice-over talent that we uncovered during this phase is my own niece. When we did our children’s book, I realized it was a great opportunity for me to collaborate with my niece. Her video below is something I will cherish forever.

As always, our first attempt at getting an app explainer video started in-house and then Fiverr. Both these efforts were not getting the right results. Upwork to the rescue again.

The freelancer we hired for the animation is from Ukraine. And, she was fantastic. Very methodical, strong work ethic, clear communication, proactive in coming up with an action plan. She is truly an asset capable of finishing her work in a strong fashion. When she was delayed, she apologized and clarified.

8. Legal stuff

This is the first time I was using a freelance lawyer within the LLC framework. Like UpWork, I had come across UpCounsel (related?) which offered Freelance legal advisors. After I made the post, I received several offers but some of the prices I saw there were extraordinary. We finally settled on a lawyer with a strong rating and a good price.

He covered a great number of points that I never thought of before. It was totally worth every penny to get his legal expertise covering bases that we would have easily missed.

9. Advertisers

Social media has made marketing a limitation of your mind. There are countless ways to promote but I am surely not good at it. The constant engagement engine to generate value for the customers is no easy feat to maintain.

For a brief while, I had tried to hire an ad campaign specialist on Fiverr but he couldn’t come through (for reasons unknown). After that experience, we have run basic ad campaigns using the animations from our animators. Canva is a great tool to build out content with ease.

Beyond these, I am thinking of just engaging with players at a grass-root level. Seeking their feedback is a calorie-intensive process but that’s the whole reason for us to be here.

10. Testers/Beta testers

Even before I had hired the third-party developers, I was pretty worried about their ability to develop the game. It was relatively complicated to implement and my worries were justified. The team struggled to implement the logic. Innovation often arises during such troubles and I came up with a much-simplified implementation approach to help achieve the end result.

The testing team struggled though. They were not used to generating test patterns that spanned days/weeks of data collection needed for the game to work. At this point, we had to step in and create extensive testing scenarios that pulled out over 150 bugs in the code. Following a simple google sheet to keep track of the bugs was effective enough to drive the resolution of these bugs.

If we hadn’t intervened and left it to the internal testing team, the core gamification part of the app would be broken. It still needs a fair amount of work to get it to a robust enough spot but it passed a critical threshold of product requirement. Now, we were ready for external testers or early adopters to take a look at our offering.

With a couple of short campaigns on social media (Redditt, Twitter, Facebook), we have started to get some external beta testers. The input from these testers is so valuable already. One thing we realized is that our product is not talking to the players. It is not explicitly telling them what to do next. We have to learn how to communicate effectively through the product itself. Game design is hard and with a bootstrapped situation, we have to overcome these challenges in a creative fashion.

Closure

It will be a lie if I don’t mention that it’s not all learning fun. Many nights and days were spent pulling my hair trying to manage the endeavor. Not to mention a good chunk of money that we spent on these efforts. As we move into a New Year and new phase of the project, it will be interesting to open up faster and deeper learning avenues.

Closing this article with my wishes for a warm and joyful holiday season to all the readers. May the New Year bring forth an abundance of love & peace to all of you.