Hi, everyone! My name is Christine, and I’m a project manager at Purrweb, a studio that designs and develops MVPs for startups. Sometimes, corporate employees come to us with their sad stories. For example, they wanted to launch an in-house startup but their contractor ruined everything, and they had to turn to another agency to remake everything. In this article, I will tell you how to avoid such a situation. At the very end, you’ll get a mini bonus — 6 questions for the first meeting with your contractor. They will help you evaluate the contractor’s expected performance during the work.
Make sure that you and your contractor have the same idea about the task
From my experience, I know that the most important goal of a kick-off call is to get acquainted with a manager and make sure you speak the same language. I mean the human language, not the professional one. You must understand that you’re talking about the same thing and describe the future task in the same words.
If a contractor doesn’t hear their client, the app will not meet expectations and most likely, you will have to pay more for it.
Here are the red flags that can warn you that an agency may create a low-quality MVP:
❌ They don’t dig deep into the essence of the project. Instead, they decide how to implement it right away. Sometimes, a manager skips questions about an app’s advantages and doesn’t try to know if you have a launch plan or how you will evaluate success. Instead, the contractor focuses on the technical details — for example, they ask how you will keep the project documentation. And they may not even be interested in how the service will solve users’ problems.
❌ They don’t send a call summary after the call. For both sides, it’s important to make summaries: what you agreed on, what is left for further discussion, and what the next step will be. If a manager doesn’t note the main points, you can be sure it is a waste of time. This means that you and your agency don’t have a mutual understanding of the agreed-upon goals, approximate costs, and shared vision.
This is what a call summary may look like.
❌ They communicate like robots or say rude things. Sometimes, a manager speaks exactly according to the script without even smiling. Or they can use rude words and belittle the client’s ideas. Serious companies invest not only in educating developers — they also level up the entire team, including managers. That’s why, if you spot a robot or a rock star at your first call, think carefully: you have likely found an indifferent contractor who’s only interested in money.
Below you can see how good and bad managers will answer your first questions 👇
Discuss the payment procedure
You’re unlikely to get an accurate budget layout during the first call — if you do, you have a reason to be suspicious. A payment format is a different thing. Find out if you need to pay the whole sum or split the payments. This will help you understand how flexible the development process will be.
These are the things that should bother you during the call:
❌ The manager doesn’t tell you what payment format they are ready to offer. If the company skirts the issue, you’re at risk of overpaying. We can name two payment plans: Fixed Price and Time & Material. Let me briefly explain what’s what.
With the Fixed Price plan, a client and an agency agree on a specific sum for the entire project. For example, a client has to pay $150,000 for an app. The main disadvantage is that this fixed price covers all the possible risks. Therefore, the final sum may significantly exceed the actual one, and the client will overpay. Besides, if you want to remove a couple of features during development, you won’t get your money back.
With the Time & Material plan, the client pays for a team’s time. For example, the team works for $100 an hour. If making an MVP requires ~900 hours, the total will be $90,000. Besides, the agency can be transparent about adding any related expenses, such as server rent and paying for software licenses.
I think that Time & Material is the most flexible format for startups. You can change anything at any moment without complicated conditions or money losses. We know that a startup is not a bronze monument — it’s a living and evolving organism. That’s why the Purrweb team chooses the Time & Material format.
❌ An agency willingly agrees to skip a part of the process. When a client needs to save their money, they’re willing to trust a manager who doesn’t insist on going through all the stages. However, an expert contractor will not give in to their client’s arguments — they will prove why the client needs all the steps. Such a contractor actually cares about the result, not just the money.
Here is an example. Before you start developing an app, devote some time to do analytics: study your audience, conduct CustDev interviews, and calculate unit economy. We described these steps in another article. If neither the client nor their contractor does analytics, there is a risk that no one will need the app and it will not pay off. As a result, you will “save” thousands of dollars, but waste dozens of thousands of dollars on development.
Here, I will show you the questions you should ask a manager and the difference between good and bad answers 👇
Find out how you’ll track the result
If a startup has never launched an app before, they may see the entire development process as the unclear, falling green code from Matrix. That’s why a team needs to be ready to present intermediate results if their client needs any comments on the work. There may be a reverse situation when a client has experience with other projects and doesn’t need regular reports. In this case, a good contractor won’t bother a startup to demonstrate every detail and make daily reports.
Ideally, a client should be able to learn the process details at any time. There are many ways to synchronize with a client. For example, you can use task trackers and work with Kanban or Scrum. We devoted a special article in our blog to explain the methods that help control development.
We at Purrweb like Scrum more than the other options. There, we make regular daily, weekly, and sprint reports for our clients. The sprint reports appear once every fortnight when we complete one feature and are ready to show it to the client.
Be careful if an agency does these things when you start talking about the intermediate results:
❌ They don’t provide a clear plan for their future reports to their clients. It’s a red flag if an agency isn’t ready to explain the step-by-step of how you’ll be able to track the process. In this case, it’s highly likely that, in the end, you’ll see an MVP that won’t meet your expectations.
❌ They are ready to tell you about the results regularly but all you’ll get is their words. It’s a dangerous situation if a manager says directly that you won’t have access to demos and test environments. You won’t be able to evaluate the app’s convenience or the advantages and disadvantages. This leads to a higher risk of getting an MVP that doesn’t comply with the set tasks.
This is the question you should ask your manager during the first call, and the answers you can get 👇
Bonus: things you shouldn’t save on even if you are afraid to waste your budget
Sometimes, it so happens that a corporate client is afraid of reaching the budget limit and saves on everything because their bosses are very unlikely to give them more money. But the development will be more expensive without certain things.
💸 Preliminary design. Some clients want to start MVP development as soon as possible and at a minimum cost. So, they just briefly look at the design and bless it right away. Still, it’s better if a contractor makes a full-fledged design concept and designs the app at the beginning.
During the preliminary design, we at Purrweb think through the logic, architecture, and features of the app. We study services and libraries, as well as think about how to implement features. Only after this process did we start developing an MVP. This may seem strange but this process doesn’t increase the budget. Instead, it helps save money.
Case from practice. Once, we developed an app for a founder from the US. Our intermediate task was to design user addresses. At the preliminary design stage, we understood that the library, which we usually use, is no good here. You see, in the States, they write the house number first, then the street name, and then the apartment number. Finally, the developers selected a library that would show an address in the necessary format. This way, we could give our clients more exact prognoses on how the app would function in the future.
💸 Technologies for custom features. If you want to implement basic features like a personal account in your app, frameworks like Flutter Flow will help you here. But no-code frameworks won’t be able to implement certain integrations quickly. Just imagine: you need to develop a payment process for the app aimed at a country without any popular payment systems. Only the local payment system is available there. No-code frameworks can probably only provide solutions for famous systems like Stripe or PayPal. That’s why your contractor has to write a custom code to develop the payment process.
💸 Post-release technical support. When a client comes with tight deadlines and budgets, they can suggest testing the app on the first users. Releasing an app that is not at all perfect and shining is a common practice. But first, you should agree on the “no major” bug model. This scheme implies that there are no significant bugs on the main user path, such as placing an order in a grocery delivery app. To fix bugs on time, make sure developers will support your app after the release — this will help you quickly correct bugs and implement updates without losing users.
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To make your first kick-off call easier, we made a list of all the questions. You can take a screenshot and open it during your talk with a manager.
In this article, we shared some theoretical information on finding an MVP contractor. To see how our agency actually works, go to our portfolio and read cases from different areas.
