How to find the perfect freelance Mobile App Developer
Mobile apps these days are vital marketing and publicity tools. Currently, there are so many freelance app developers around. Although this is a good thing, this can make us somewhat spoiled for choice for when we want to hire an app developer. As is typical of anything with high demand and equally high supply, there comes a challenge when having to dissect your good freelance mobile app developer from your not so good. As such, you need to take extra care when hiring a freelance mobile app developer – the last thing you want is a bug-ridden app on launch!
Before we jump in, one thing to remember is to make sure you shop around. No matter how impressive the individual freelance app developer may appear, it’s important to explore the field and chat with a few more prospective developers before making a choice. If you hire the first developer that you come across, you may miss out on better deals, experience, and quality.
Versatility is key
When looking for a freelance app developer, it’s also good to hire an expert that is skilled in other parts of digital marketing, be it analytics or content marketing. Transferable skillsets, particularly within the digital vertical, are so vital these days as in many ways different facets of the digital ecosystem are linked. For example, skills within SEO, CRO and app store optimisation do overlap and experts are expected to know things that sit outside their particular specialisms. This can also help save you a lot of time and money by hiring the same personnel for some, if not all your digital marketing needs other than hiring separate specialists for each of them.
It’s all about communication
You should hire a freelance app developer that has great communication and presentation skills. A good freelancer in this field will be able to communicate to you in a way that exempts you from having to understand technical jargon. From a B2C perspective, you also want to entrust them with having the ability to be able to explain the benefits of each feature on your mobile app through strong design, functionality and copy.
Ensure that they can incorporate analytics into your mobile app
This should be incorporated into your app so that you can be getting necessary analytics on a daily basis. It is these statistics that will help you monitor the performance of your app and drive your strategy moving forward. Key daily reports that app analytics give include crash rates, product views, average time on a certain page, active users conversions, bounce rate and much more. These can not only inform performance and strategy though can also prove vital when reporting back your app development and marketing efforts to your key stakeholders.
Do they have a physical office?
A reliable freelance app developer should have a physical office even if their home doubles as their office. This not only gives somewhat of a “face” to the person you’re working with, it allows some sense of security if you’ve got proper details of correspondence, even if it’s just a phone number. If you’re able to ascertain higher budgets for your hiring of a freelancer, you may find that you’re able to acquire the services of an app development agency, which will no doubt give you the peace of mind if it’s a physical office you’re after.
Negotiate a bit
While some freelance app developers will lay out their charges like they are not negotiable, some of them can be negotiated downwards somewhat if you’re willing to try and have an open discussion. This can involve methods such as getting price reductions through long term partnership commitments for example. Remember there’s nothing to lose if you try!
