If you pay consultants or freelancers you're going to get exactly what you ask for, and you're definitely not going to be getting anything better than that. You

If you pay consultants or freelancers you're going to get exactly what you ask for, and you're definitely not going to be getting anything better than that. Your mvp will likely be a pure standalone piece of software that you can never build upon and any changes that you want made will get very expensive very quickly. If you have a technical product and it's doing something more complicated than shuffling data around it's probably not in your best interests to outsource your development. External developers are going to be incentivized to build exactly what you tell them to build then charge you fees for maintenance and modifications. Building a quality product is not going to be a focus because that's not the way they get rewarded. These are, of course, not impossible problems to overcome, but you have your work cut out for you to mitigate these structural issues. In my opinion, product oriented startups needs someone to build it and someone to sell it. Startups that don't have both bases covered are exceedingly unlikely to succeed. You're likely to successfully build an MVP, sell it, and make minor modifications only to hit a wall about 6-12 months after your initial release. Past that point your product won't be able to keep pace with your sales. This is manageable but without someone technical to drive that transition you'll probably mess it up. Best of luck.