James Sinclair advises non-technical founders to do deep reference checks on agencies, asking about budget overruns and scope creep, not just reviews. Learn enough to have a seat at technical decisions like monolith vs microservice and language choice.
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If you're a non technical startup founder and you're about to engage with an agency or engineers to build your mvp and you don't have a mentor around you to kind of guide you or help you ask the right questions, two things I think you should do. Number one, do references. Don't just rely on the five star reviews. Speak to someone. Find out about budget timeline, how they communicate issues, how change of scope impacts everything. There's no reason not to have that conversation, even if it delays everything for two days. The second thing you have to do is you have to create a framework that allows you to have a seat at the table around technical decisions. You cannot play the well, I don't understand, so I guess they're making the best decision for me. That doesn't work. Instead, you need to make sure you've built a framework that allows them to come to you, explain the concept so that you can Google research, do your own investigation, understand the pros, the cons, the implications, and have a seat at the table around the decision. There's a couple of simple ones. Monolith or microservice? Are you going to build API first? How are you going to build it? What language are you going to use? There's a lot of conversations. You have the right to at least have a seat at the table. Good luck.
