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Do you really need to hire an outsourcer?
Identify your needs. Create a small document where you can specify all the basic characteristics, features, and business requirements.
Research the market against the similar solution. This will help you better outline what features, UI elements, or design patterns you want to use in your future app. Sometimes, the research stops at this stage, whilst you feel the need of proper business consultancy, so you omit the following steps and go straight to finding business analytic across the outsourcing portals.
Review your resources, scope, and budget. If you’re a non-tech company & don’t know how to outsource software development, just start straight away with an offshore company and deliver your project idea. Your vendor should go with a comprehensive business research, conduct proof of concept and suggest appropriate solution.
Evaluate the options. Once you made up your mind on hiring external resources, it's time to post a project on the net. The journey starts from the multiple platforms for hiring software developers – some of them offer freelance individuals or teams, others give you an opportunity to select from top talents at a time-proven company. Let's walk through the most popular portals offering software developers.
How to evaluate the potential vendor?
How to decide whether you need a company vendor or a freelancer?
Freelancer:
Company:
Where to find your software vendor?
1. Freelance platforms: Upwork, Freelancer.com, People Per Hour.
Make your descriptions in as many details as possible. Explain what you expect from your vendors, how long your project is going to last, how much you are ready to pay, provide the information on the technology stack used in a project. You’ll be surprised how many candidates can be filtered by these simple trick.
Mind the rating: high-rated developers are rarely free, and some unrated developers are busy in real life so that they don't have many clients on U pwork or Freelancer.com .
Don't stop at the first appropriate freelancer. Consider 5-10 candidates and let them go through test task. After that, conduct an interview with top talents.
2. "Premium"- talent platforms: Toptal, Crew, etc.
3. Partnering marketplaces and meet-ups
4. Directories
Choose a category or research Leader Matrix, select those companies that match your price and delivery rates expectations. Read the detailed reviews of their partners and clients.
Find them in Google, look through their websites, study their case studies, check the quality of products/solution they delivered.
Contact them. Ask them for an estimate of time and resources, listen to their language, check their competence.
Select the best fit.
5. Search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing
Search deeper than 1-2 pages, or set 100 results per page.
Try filtering results by region/language/business sector.
Exclude the words that will lead you to irrelevant results (“free”, “premium”, etc.).
Change your request slightly to toss the results.
Freelancing is less beneficial in the long run, so the only reasonable option for a large business is to outsource to a company.
Looking for a company don’t rely much on search engines, better consult directories and see real customers’ testimonials.
If you don’t know where to start, try meetups or hackathons and talk to like-minders.
Good luck in finding an amazing partner!