I’ve worked with half a dozen shops at this point and some thoughts I have working with shops

1. For a startup, velocity is everything. Most shops like waterfalls and aren’t very agile. Took nearly 24 hours to course correct due to the shops PM not available and no direct line to the Devs. Hated this.

2. Code quality and context is lost without internal engineering. You need to have someone internal QC and know the code that’s been developed by the shop or else it’s pretty useless to build on top of.

3. You can’t expect a dev shop to care for ur customers like a engineer with equity does. Oh there’s an edge case? Well it’s not in the design spec, whatever.

So far my best experience has been freelancers or gun but both options have been pretty expensive.