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There's 5 stages: Define, design, develop, testing, deploy There are different kinds of people suited to these stages. First step, get someone to write out what you want to do, ideally a developer. Commission a scope of work document, or write one yourself, with things like what pages are on your application, what relation they take to each other, UI, and so on. It's better for someone in programming or design to do this. Get a rough estimate for each. You'll probably have to pay a good amount to get that done, but it's not wasted time. It's wasted if they misunderstand and build something you don't want. It's wasted if you misunderstand how expensive a component in (Social media logins are an example of something more effort than people realize). It's wasted effort and money if you thought you wanted something, but then scrap it later because that wasn't a good idea after all. And defining the problem is a big part of development as well, one that gets glanced over even by professionals. You should do wireframes to define UI - basically little sketches for buttons and where they go to, etc, and not with fonts, color, and the like. Once you get the definition down, you should have a good feel for how good the person you're hiring is. If they're dumb it will clearly show, and make you frustrated. If they're great, they'll add input of their own and improve your plans. Then you get to work on the following stages - hire a designer, a tester, find a way to deploy it to the users, though some freelancers can probably do all of this solo. Once deployed and you get your feedback, you cycle back to the definition phase for the next features. |