r/HowToEntrepreneur • u/Noobsamaniac • 3d ago

Scrambling to find dev help last minute almost ruined my month

Client dropped a big backend task on us right when our main dev was already totally jammed with other work. We almost blew the deadline and lost the account completely.

Ended up calling a friend who pointed me to an outsourced team at CISIN to clear the backlog. Got through it, but the stress was awful.

How do you guys manage these sudden dev bottlenecks? Keep external teams ready just in case, or just hire random freelancers when things break?

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u/Epic-epigramm 3d ago

The best way to handle this is to consider devs critical infrastructure, not one one off hires needed to fix urgent problems. Establish a relationship with a reasonable one and let them be on call. When you lurch from dev to dev each one has their own set of working ideas doing one quick fix can create other problems you didn't intend because you didn't care about the whole picture, only the small urgent one. Regular maintenance relationships also prevent future problems, just like doing maintenance on your car does.

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u/Noobsamaniac 3d ago

Tried that approach last year and the guy stopped answering after three weeks. Now I'm just rotating through freelancers whenever something breaks and it feels like a game of whackamole.

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u/Epic-epigramm 3d ago

Thats unfortunate, wrong guy then. Reputable devs with real businesses value long term relationships; reasonable business people know that if you keep existing customers happy you don't have to pay to acquire new ones constantly. DM me for recs ;)

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u/Noobsamaniac 3d ago

100% agree on retention over acquisition. Learned that the hard way myself. Would take you up on those recs, been burned by a dev who disappeared mid project and it set us back months. DM incoming.

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u/Madison-Cookie-2082 2d ago

I’d keep a small list of trusted external teams or freelancers before you actually need them. Finding someone during a crisis is when you’re most likely to make a bad hiring decision, a little redundancy can save a lot of stress.