Build a keyboard app that suggests texts right inside the dating app

Joseph ChoiHiring devs is like one of the biggest problems in starting uh, you know, starting software companies, cuz you're just Especially if you're non-technical, you just don't know what to look for and it's expensive. It can be expensive. So, did you just dive in and say like, "I'm just going to waste the money if I waste the money and I'll learn something," or were you like careful about the initial vetting?

Dmitri MirakyanI was trying to be super careful. When you don't know how the black box works, and like you don't know the code yourself, and you don't know how long something takes, I think that the first project that we wound up building with a dev team was the like we had a keyboard app, which that, in itself, turned out to be a really bad product that actually performed much worse than literally just our core flow. It was like an app that integrated into your keyboard, so that you wouldn't have to switch screens, and it would just like tell you what to text like right there while you were on the dating app.

Dmitri MirakyanInterviewed a bunch of people, were super careful, were like very aggressive about budgets, but then like what they built was still like it looked and felt like what we needed, but it was like deeply broken on the inside and took like longer and cost more than it was intended to cost, which I think is the case with I think every story that I hear of somebody like not that technical building something out. It helped that I was technical enough that I'd like worked with devs and that like I operated the back end myself, so I had like some sense of smell for what was good and what was bad.

Dmitri MirakyanBut like, god, hiring an agency, terrible time. And then like yeah, hiring somebody before you know what you're doing. I'm wondering like, how do other people do this? Like is there is there any sort of shortcut, or are you basically just kind of fucked the first time you hire a dev if you're like not that technical? Has anybody actually found a good work around for this?