A major challenge for non-technology founders who are outsourcing is making sure that the people who are building your product consistently stick around.
When you outsource your software project, the agency will allocate a team to work on that project. Those people on that team will get to understand you, your business, and the thing they built really well – ideally you don’t want those people to disappear off, never to be seen again.
You will also ALMOST CERTAINLY find that someone on that team is SO GOOD that you pretty much want to marry them.
This creates a problem for the agency in that they have to spread the team around a whole bunch of projects, with clients who are spending sporadically. Offshore agencies also… will say they have 100-200 developers when they’re all actually self-employed associates. (This is less of an issue with UK agencies who’s developers are usually PAYE.)
The deal here is that you have to get – somehow – the agency to agree to this. It’s not likely something you can legislate for, it’s more a “best endeavours” thing, but like a lot of my content for non-technology founders, forewarned is forearmed.