Choosing the Right Freelancer for Your Invention Development

Learn some tips on how to find the right professionals to design and develop your physical product idea.

There are many things to consider when developing a physical product but most of the development activities rely on skilled professionals.

Choosing the right professionals and skills is one of the most important tasks to focus on at the beginning since you will be collaborating together for a fair amount of time during the development.

Probably, the most common concern that I heard from people looking for someone to help with their product development is the lack of trust.

Trust is essential when working with other humans.

Not only you are giving away sensitive information about your idea, and going to spend a fair amount of time collaborating together, but you are also going to invest a decent amount of money in those services.

However, many innovators with no technical background or without previous experience developing products, usually don’t have access to professionals they already trust to build their ideas.

Nowadays, is relatively easy to find skilled professionals through freelance marketplaces. There are more and more options to choose from and the offer is large. But trust is still an issue.

You won’t know much about a person just from a profile photo and a basic description, and sometimes communication and cultural differences could be a barrier as well.

In the worst case, you could even be misled by some fake profiles describing highly skilled professionals with high rates that turn out to be low-quality freelancers or even scam (I had experienced that myself years ago).

There is no shortcut to building trust but you can do your due diligence.

Here there is a list of considerations that will help you decide who is the best fit for your project and get some initial confidence.

Select the professional category you require and further filter based on skills needed, such as conceptual design, plastic injection molding, fabrics specialist, fluids expert, firmware engineer among many others.

Make sure you define a budget and a deadline based on the activities that you are requesting. You don’t want to spend half your budget on a task that should be a couple of hours work for a specialist, and you don’t want to get no one interested or low-quality profiles due to a very low budget.

So understanding how long certain tasks might take is crucial, and you might need someone with the knowledge to give you advice on that.

Check out references of their previous work to see if there is a match with the skills you need. Also the way they present their work can tell you a lot about how they work.

In most freelance sites, you can actually see reviews from previous clients. Do not get too hung up with that, as many times they are simply cordial reviews, but look for any particular bad review. Also, many new profiles do not have reviews yet but some certainly deserve a chance.

Make sure you contact them before hiring anyone to see if the language is not a barrier and how you will be communicating throughout the project.

Define exactly the list of deliverables that you will need from them, documentation and also files, such as 3D models, files for 3D printing, 2D drawings and so on. You could, for example, define a particular 3D software that they will work with so you don’t get files in different formats.

Be concrete in what you want them to do, and as mentioned before which deliverables you are expecting from them. If not done properly, it is a common source of misunderstandings and problems later on.

If you want to be on the safe side, make some sort of agreement with the above information and include intellectual property protection clauses. You can simply use one of the thousands of standard templates online, or if you use a freelancer site they have their own already.

The most critical advice here is to always get on a quick call (videoconference even better) with them before hiring their services. It will help you confirm most of the above points.

The other most common concern is actually what kind of skills you need to hire that are relevant to your product.

Obviously, for non-technical people, knowing which technical skills are required for their product will be challenging if they are not familiar with product development.

Especially challenging for them will be how to assess if the amount of work hours they propose is right or if the work they deliver is technically acceptable.

These are the main categories of professionals used in the design of physical products.

If you still feel lost about what you need to look for, or what your product requires, try to get advice from other professionals. You could book an hour or two with an expert to go through your idea and define the requirements. You could also get into online technical forums and ask for advice.

Make sure to spend a bit of time getting this right because it is going to be an investment in terms of time and money on your project. Sometimes you can rely on your intuition when finding someone for your project, but if you follow the above suggestions you will also limit the chance of ugly surprises.

Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.

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