Summary

If you’re a SaaS founder, especially one without a technical background, one of the first major decisions you’ll face is how to build your product. Do you hire a CTO? Do you bring in freelancers? Do you outsource the whole thing?

I’ve worked with and built products for enough founders to know this: you don’t need to hire a full tech team right away. In fact, trying to do that too early can slow you down, burn your budget, and put you in hiring loops instead of getting to users and revenue.

Outsourcing your SaaS development — if done right — can give you a head start, keep your burn low, and let you focus where your attention is needed most: go-to-market (GTM), customers, and validation.

Here’s how to think through it.

First Things First: You Don’t Need a CTO (Yet)

This part might ruffle some feathers, but hear me out.

You probably don’t need a full-time CTO in the very early days. What you need is a working product that solves a clear problem, and a fast feedback loop from your users. A CTO is valuable when you’re scaling, hiring engineers, building long-term infra. But pre-revenue? Pre-product-market-fit? It’s overkill.

In fact, a part-time CTO — someone you can bring in for a few hours a week to guide architecture, review code, or make high-level decisions — is often more than enough. Some founders even work with a technical advisor or fractional CTO on a retainer basis, just to keep things moving in the right direction without adding full-time cost or complexity.

Instead of rushing into a full-time tech hire, work with a product-led agency or a technical partner that understands SaaS and startup dynamics. You’ll move faster, stay lean, and make decisions based on traction, not theory

What You Should Focus On as a Founder Instead

While someone else is handling the nuts and bolts of your product, you need to be out there

• Talking to early users
• Figuring out your GTM motion
• Testing different positioning
• Building distribution channels
• Validating the pricing model
• Running demos, closing early adopters

No product survives without a solid go-to-market strategy. I’ve seen too many founders build a beautiful app with zero plan to get users — and they end up back at square one.
Let your tech partner handle the sprints, the commits, and the infrastructure. You go handle growth.

How to Vet a Development Agency (Before You Hire Them)

Not all outsourcing partners are the same. Some are design-heavy and know nothing about backend infra. Some are just body shops. Some ghost you halfway.

Here’s how to check if the agency you’re about to work with actually knows their stuff:

• Ask what SaaS platforms they’ve built before
  Don’t just ask for a portfolio — ask for case studies or past work similar to yours. If they’ve built B2B SaaS before, even better.
• Talk to their PM or tech lead before signing
  This tells you what their communication style is like. Are they product-driven or just executing tickets?
• Do they understand business logic, not just code?
  If you explain your product, they should ask you why you’re building a feature, not just how. If they ask about KPIs, user personas, and revenue models — green flag.
• Ask them how they manage handovers
  More on this below — but a good partner should already have a playbook for handover, documentation, and transition.
• Small test project or audit
  Start with something small — maybe a wireframe to clickable prototype or a short 2-week sprint — before you commit to a 3-month dev cycle.

During Development: How to Know If It’s Going Well

Outsourcing doesn’t mean “out of sight.” You should still be involved in the weekly rhythm. Here’s what to look for:

• Weekly demos: You should see real progress weekly. Ask for a video or Loom if you’re async.
• Transparent boards: Use tools like ClickUp, Jira, or Trello — everything should be visible: backlog, in progress, done.
• Clear PM updates: You should know what was completed last sprint, what’s next, and where blockers are.
• Real-time chat: Whether it’s Slack, Discord, or WhatsApp — you should have a way to get quick answers or clarifications.

Here’s a simple weekly checklist I give to founders I work with:

• Is the team delivering in small, shippable chunks every 1–2 weeks?
• Are they pushing updates regularly to staging?
• Do you get weekly demos or updates (video or async)
• Can you log into your PM tool and see what’s in progress?
• Are they documenting the product and key decisions?

Project Management Tools That Help (Even if You’re Non-Technical)

If you’re getting vague updates like “we’re working on the backend” without any demos, that’s a red flag.

If you want to stay organized as the founder, you don’t need to learn GitHub or write JIRA tickets. Just set up:

• Agile Scrum Management
• Product Management Dashboard Template
• Use Loom for async walkthroughs
• Miro for flow diagrams and user journeys
• Notion for documentation and handover notes

These tools help you and your agency stay on the same page — and they’ll be super useful when you hand things over to your internal team later.

How to Plan for Handover to Your Future In-House Team

Even if you plan to build your own dev team later, that doesn’t mean outsourcing is a waste — you just need to plan for the handover. Here’s how:

• Documentation, always
  Your agency should deliver technical documentation, product specs, and infra setup (DB schema, environments, credentials, etc.)
• Codebase walkthrough
  Ask for a 30–60 min session where they walk your future devs through the codebase. Record it.
• Version control and access
  Make sure everything lives in your org — GitHub repos, cloud infra, CI/CD pipelines.
• A proper backlog
  Leave a clear backlog of bugs, future features, and tech debt, so your new team knows where to pick up.
• Bonus: Keep the agency on standby
  It’s smart to keep them around for the first month of the in-house team — for smoother onboarding and clarification.

Final Thoughts

Look, building SaaS is hard — and building too early, too big can make it even harder.
If you’re a founder in the early stage, you need to stay obsessed with your users, not tangled in technical weeds.

Outsourcing your SaaS development gives you speed, flexibility, and momentum — if you do it right.

At Beyond Labs, I’ve worked with dozens of startups in this exact stage — validating ideas, launching MVPs, scaling post-PMF. And what I’ve seen again and again is: the founders who focus on GTM early win faster. The ones who try to play CTO too soonm They burn out.

Build fast. Stay lean. Keep your focus on the right things.
And if you need help — we’re here for that.