Let’s unpick one of the reasons why non-technology founders often lose all their money when using an outsourced agency to build their MVP.
Regardless of what the agency might say, they always operate in a mode whereby they need to have the whole project described up front. They will take your description, come up with a price, you will agree to pay them that price, and they will deliver what you described.
Startups are always operating in “full on experimentation mode”, because your first vision of what this thing should look like and do will go through many iterations – with the customer – before the final product is delivered.
This is what the process of finding product-market fit is – it’s a process of continuous iterative experiments that ultimately converge on product-market fit.
Agencies can’t do experimental work, because it doesn’t fit their commercial model, and from my experience, agencies tend not to know they more often than not hurt founders because of this mismatch.
If you want to work with an agency, you’ll need to found out how they intend to square that circle.