developers

4 best ways to find top developers to build your product

You have an idea and now you need a developer to turn that idea into a reality.

In this day and age, it is now possible to build and create your product on a shoe-string budget that is typical of early-stage companies and startup businesses. That said, it’s still important to make sure you find yourself a well-qualified developer and preferably, a team that you can rely on to get your product launched.

Below are some of the best places for you to find top developers:

Meetups:

Local meetups are where people come together to discuss and do the things they love. Developers frequently meetup to discuss the latest technologies, trends, and connect with one another. Go to local meetups, especially any meetups that are discussing topics related to your product. Also, attend meetups that are about the technologies that you know would be used in your product. Network with the developers there and connect with them around what they’re doing in your relevant industry.

If you like a meetup, we recommend contributing and providing value. This can only help. Being involved in the community allows you to attract great talent that’s also likely to be interested in what you’re building. Here are two resources to find meetups around the globe:

For example, here’s a popular New York based technology meetup – New York Tech

Reddit:

Reddit is an online platform where people engage in the topics of their interest. There are separate pages for almost every possible topic, these are called Subreddits. Search to find subreddits that are related to your product or it’s technologies and join them (it’s free), and make sure to read the rules and the Wiki of that subreddit, usually found in a sidebar to the right of the subreddit’s page.

Our recommendation is to get involved within the community and as you engage, you can post your needs or questions and raise a discussion around the problem you are trying to solve.

For Example, if you want to find a AR / VR developer you could go to one of these threads:

Sample message you could drop that we’ve seen to be effective:

“Hi, I’m working on this cool VR project that is well-positioned to change the game! We already have X users / dollars / investors lined up and are looking for someone to chat with about this problem we’re solving.”

By focusing on a problem, the community will self-select and you are much more likely to find developers and other technical talent who are most passionate about your idea.

Github:

Github is a tool that developers use to manage the code they write. This is a viable option where you can find the developers who have committed code in your technologies and message them. You can also look up the open-source technologies that your solution will use and look at the developers who have committed code to those projects.

If you are able to see the public commits of a developer and these happen to be in your technologies, look at the projects they have worked on. If you find any that are Open Source, that means the developer is big into the technology and it’s Open Source community which is also a good criteria to help evaluate talent.

Here is where you can see the most popular languages being coded in from the projects on Github, then dig deeper into those to find developers: http://githut.info/

Development Platforms:

Development platforms are a recent breed of solutions to help get your product out the door, these have recently become popular (and possible) because of the gig economy. These are platforms where you can connect with either freelancers or small-to-medium teams of developers to build your product. Two such viable platforms are Reliable Bits and Upwork.

These platforms solve the problems around finding your freelancers yourself, needing to vet their capabilities yourself, and then being tied down to that one individual. These are great because the platform does the vetting.

With these platforms, like ours, you get a complete team of designers, backend/server-side engineers, front-end engineers, mobile developers, QA engineers and Product Manager to make sure your product is created as you need it and is launched the right way. All these are rolled up as part of the project.

Often times the developers on self-service sites such as Upwork are freelancers as well and have to take on many projects at the same time since they are specialized in one part of the puzzle that you need. As a result, you have to find individual developers for every part of your development. Which is totally doable if you are well-versed in your technologies and know how to manage a cross-functional team of several developers and designers and have the time to manage them full-time.

If not, the choice of a platform that offers a managed service to get your product launched might be something to look into.

(Full disclaimer: Reliable Bits is one such platform focused on helping any non-technical founders, female founders and minority-founders.) Get a free quote here by clicking on Price My Project. We provide fixed-rate quotes in a matter of hours.