3 crucial questions before you hire your first tech team

You’ve raised some funding. You’ve got a big idea. Now comes the hardest part: making the right decisions when you're not the technical one in the room.

If you're feeling nervous, you're not alone.

For non-technical founders, the fear isn’t usually about the product failing. It’s about spending £25k, £50k, £100k or more and ending up with something that looks fine on the surface, but turns into a nightmare behind the scenes. Bloated costs. Sluggish progress. Locked-in systems you can’t control. Dev teams you can’t get rid of. Most founders don’t talk about this publicly, but we’ve seen it again and again.

The good news? You don’t need to be technical to avoid these problems. You just need to ask the right questions upfront.

If they can’t answer these, walk away.

1. “How fast can you get my feedback into the hands of real users?”

No one gets the product perfect on day one. The winners are the ones who learn the fastest. That’s why speed to feedback is critical. If it takes a week to deploy a small change, you're not learning fast enough. If it takes two weeks just to show a customer a minor update, you're not iterating, you're stalling.

What you should hear:

“We can deploy multiple times a day. We’ve got automated pipelines, and if you’ve got a quick change, we can usually push it live the same day.”

What to avoid:

“We’ll need to discuss that in the next sprint planning session and get back to you”

“Our next release is in 2–3 weeks, we’ll add it to the queue.”

Every extra day adds to your burn rate and delays your learning. Fast iteration means faster decisions, faster user feedback, and a faster path to revenue or investment.

2. “How many programming languages or frameworks are you using?”

This is the silent killer for many startups. You don’t realise the cost until it’s too late.

The issue isn’t the tech itself, its the unnecessary complexity. Every additional language or framework in your product means a new specialist you’ll eventually have to hire, manage, and replace if they leave. Most early-stage products do not need five different technologies stitched together. In fact, that almost guarantees slower delivery, higher cost, and a painful onboarding process for any future hires.

A typical "agency-architected" stack might include:

Django for backend

React for web frontend

Swift for iOS

Kotlin for Android

AWS Lambda for backend services

Sounds robust, right? Until you realise you need four or five different experienced developers just to keep it alive. And if one of them leaves, you're stuck.

What you should hear:

“We recommend a single, full-stack language, like TypeScript, so developers can work across the entire codebase. They are able to shift focus based on business priorities”

What to avoid:

“We’re using this new framework, it’s what everyone is talking about right now”

Translation: they're building complexity now to lock you in and boost their own billable hours, not to make your life easier.

The best tech setup isn’t the one with the most buzzwords. It’s the one that lets you move fast, make changes easily, and hire flexibly as you grow. In practice, these phrases can signal a solution built for technical elegance rather than business value. And sometimes it means choosing tools that are new and unproven or niche, which can be hard (and expensive) to hire for down the line.

We’re not against modern tools. Far from it.

But at this stage, the priority is using proven, popular, widely supported technologies, not the latest trend that only a small talent pool knows how to maintain. One clean, modern stack gives you flexibility. Multiple niche tools create friction.

3. “Do I own the IP and the full source code?”

We cannot stress this enough: this is where founders get trapped.

The appeal of a white-label or “proprietary platform” build is obvious: it’s often cheaper and quicker to get started. Until you want to change something.

Then they tell you:

You need to pay extra to make even basic changes.

You don’t actually own the code, you're just licensing it.

If you leave, you’ll only get part of the work back. Maybe.

One customer we spoke to had paid nearly £2 million for a white-label solution. When they wanted to swap a logo on the app, they were quoted £30,000. No joke. And when they asked for the code, they were told they’d need to buy it separately, at another inflated cost as it was proprietary.

If you’re relying on something you don’t fully own, you’re building your business on someone else’s terms.

What you should hear:

“Yes, you own 100% of the code, the IP, and all deployment rights. You can take it anywhere.”

What to avoid:

“You’re licensing our proprietary platform”

“You’ll have full access, except the core modules”

“We use no-code tools that are faster to build with” (which often means not yours)

Bonus: “How experienced are the people I’ll be working with”

It’s one thing to trust the agency. It’s another to know who’s actually writing the code.

Some agencies win your trust with senior people, then hand you over to a team of junior developers with little real-world experience, or outsourced teams. That might work for internal tools. It’s not what you want for your startup’s first build. Early-stage decisions set the tone for the next 6–12 months of your product and they need to be made by people who’ve done this before.

So ask:

Who will I actually be working with day-to-day?

What kind of experience do they have with startups like mine?

Are they full-time employees or outsourced contractors?

Good partners will be transparent about the who’s doing the work. Great ones will experienced in-house teams and also have processes in place to avoid single points of failure like shared knowledge, documentation, and clean handover.

You don’t need to be technical to make good technical decisions.

The biggest startup failures we’ve seen didn’t happen because the founder had a bad idea. They happened because the founder trusted the wrong partner, and only realised too late that their product had become a money pit.

Asking these three questions could save you millions of pounds. They can protect your product, your team, and your chances of turning investment into growth.

Build it right the first time with Contic Launchpad

This is exactly why we built Contic Launchpad, to give non-technical founders the momentum they need without the mess.

Fixed cost. Clear delivery. No bloat. No surprises.

If you’re not happy after Discovery, we’ll give your money back. And if we move forward, you’ll have a live product within 3 months, built properly, built to scale, and built to be yours.

You own it. You control it. You can grow with it.

Book an intro call and let’s build something that works, and lasts.