Ciaran had been in the freight transportation industry for more than 20 years. He noticed that, on the one hand, many shippers have trouble finding reliable carriers to move their pallets of goods. On the other hand, carriers’ trucks run with an average fill rate of only 63%—very inefficient for a multibillion-dollar industry.

Ciaran saw a massive opportunity.

He knew that if he could better connect shippers and carriers, he could solve an important problem for both. His goal was to create a marketplace for freight logistics that could improve fill rates and efficiencies for carriers, get shippers a better price on their transportation costs, reduce the carbon footprint of the industry, and bring more insight into the status of in-transit goods.

Ciaran’s problem was that he needed to build software, but didn’t have a background in tech. He needed to build a robust Minimum Viable Product (MVP) on a fixed R&D budget. And once he had the MVP, he needed to develop the technical capacity of his fledgling startup to maintain the product.

Ciaran started with a pretty clear idea of what he needed his product to be able to do. The trouble was that he didn’t have the expertise to manage a software development project and hire good developers. He needed someone to help him turn his business idea into a set of features and find a team that could build it.

Software agencies make money by charging senior developer rates but pay junior developers to actually build the product. There’s no substitute for experience—most juniors at an agency simply don’t have the technical strength to build the solid foundation a product needs to be able to scale.

I offered Ciaran my 20+ years of software development experience to manage a team of freelance senior developers that I vetted and managed. I’ve shipped over a dozen MVPs since starting my first software company in 2007, including a marketplace similar to the one Ciaran wanted to build (I grew it to $130 million in volume).

The devs I chose were experienced and effective. I made sure that our interests aligned—I was managing the devs for a fixed price, so if they weren’t good, it was my headache.

Agencies rarely commit to a fixed price bid because a fixed price comes with estimation risk. Instead, they bill in weekly increments for the length of the project—the longer the project, the more you pay.

The downside of this approach is that if the project is not well managed your scope can increase significantly, and you may pay a lot more than you anticipated. Or, you may spend your entire budget but get a product that doesn’t do what you want it to.

The approach I take is that my clients don’t pay a penny more than the fee we agree to for the product we agree to build. I take on the estimation risk, and I manage it by drawing on my experience and conducting an extensive blueprinting exercise to flesh out the details before we start building.

Ciaran knew that he was going to need a bit of wiggle room with his scope. The agencies he was considering couldn’t provide that.

I ultimately provided Ciaran with three solutions. First, I helped him plan the product blueprint — an 80 page document for the web, iOS, and Android apps he needed to build. This enabled me to provide him with a fixed price to build his MVP.

Then, once he chose me to actually build the MVP, I put together a team of developers to build the first version of the MVP.

Finally, I found him a technical lead to join the team and guide the development of the product into the future.

During the blueprinting session, I worked with Ciaran to understand the business needs and translate them into specific features with a set of requirements. This blueprint served as the shared understanding of what a successful build looked like.

In my experience this is the single most important step for project success. Agencies may design some screens up front, but the devil’s in the details. With my approach, the blueprint lays out all the key flows and screens in the app along with what happens on each screen. Agencies rarely take the time to flesh this out in advance because they charge you every week or month—the longer the project, the better for them.

By the end of this session, Ciaran knew what he needed to build and what “done” would look like. I also provided a fixed cost and estimated timeline for me to build what we laid out in the blueprint.

After seeing the roadmap, Ciaran hired me to build it. My role became a CTO / CPO (Chief Product Officer), and I found two full-time senior freelance developers to code the MVP. I set up the team’s process and tooling, and I managed them to deliver a quality and scalable product with the features that we specced in the blueprint. I met with Ciaran weekly—sometimes more often—throughout the process to keep him up to speed, show him new features, and get feedback to tweak these so they’d be market-ready.

I estimated it would take six months to build the MVP, and we launched in six months and 3 days.

When an agency finishes a product, they toss it to you over the fence and move on to the next. That’s fine for some, but it wasn’t ideal for Ciaran who didn’t yet have a development team.

Instead, I connected him with the lead freelance developer that I had hired so that he could have the option to hire them to continue working on the project. The dev ended up coming on board and is now working closely with Ciaran and leading Loadar’s technical development.

I also set Ciaran and the team up with a robust development process and tooling he needed to keep the project humming along.