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Decision skill · FreeProduct Loop

Agency vs. freelancer vs. first hire

Who should build your MVP: a dev agency, a freelancer, or your first engineering hire?

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Version 1.0 · Plain text · No email required · CC BY-SA 4.0

What this skill does

Hand this file to Claude or ChatGPT. The assistant interviews you, one question at a time, through this decision's determining questions — on your specifics. It then applies the decision rules to your answers and gives you the recommendation plainly, with the conditions under which it would change.

The decision it executes
Agency vs. freelancer vs. first hire →

The three ways to get your MVP built, what each really costs beyond the invoice, and the questions that tell you which one fits your runway and stage.

The guide is the canonical version: determining questions, paths with dated costs, what I'd do, and limits. It belongs to The Product Loop.

Escalation clause
An honest tool knows its edges.

This decision stops being self-serve — and needs a human with scars in the room — when:

  • The product is in a regulated domain (health, finance, or anything with a compliance regime) — builder selection carries legal and safety consequences this walkthrough doesn't cover.
  • The technology itself is the moat (deep tech, novel algorithms) — the rent-first default here is wrong for them.
  • A technical co-founder is already committed — the real question is what that person builds versus delegates, which is a different decision.
  • This is a follow-on build on an existing codebase — inherited code changes every cost and risk above; the codebase needs an independent assessment first.
When this skill revises
Optional. The download never depends on it.

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