Prothes Barai
Founder & Engineer, PSBM Labs
Choosing who builds your product is one of the highest-stakes decisions an early founder makes, and the portfolio page rarely tells the full story. This is what we'd tell a friend evaluating development teams, including us.
Look past the portfolio thumbnails
Ask to see a live, working link for at least one shipped project — not just screenshots. Screenshots hide load times, broken flows, and half-finished features. A team confident in their work will happily hand you a link.
Ask who actually owns the code
Before signing anything, confirm in writing that you own the full source code and repository access on completion, not just the final compiled app. Some outsourcing arrangements quietly retain code ownership or make it difficult to hand off — this should be a non-negotiable clause in your contract.
Fixed price vs hourly — read what it signals
A team willing to quote a fixed price has already done the work of scoping your requirements carefully enough to commit to a number. Open-ended hourly billing without a scoping phase is a common source of budget overruns, because there's no shared definition of what "done" looks like.
Communication cadence, agreed upfront
Ask exactly how and how often you'll get updates — weekly demos, a shared task board, direct messaging access to the actual engineers. Vague answers here ("we'll keep you posted") tend to predict silent months later in the project.
Red flags worth taking seriously
- Reluctance to share a written scope of work before payment
- No clear point of contact — you're bounced between account managers
- Portfolio projects that no longer exist or don't load
- Pressure to sign before you've had time to review the contract
What we do differently as a small, founder-run studio
We're two engineers who scope and build directly — no account managers relaying messages between you and the people writing code. It's not the right fit for every project, but it does mean the person quoting your timeline is the same person accountable for hitting it.