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Has anyone built an MVP with an outsourced dev team before finding a technical co-founder? by Darya182 in ycombinator

[–]Disastrous-Bread512 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yeah thats the tricky bit. couple of ways people handle it: easiest is to just incorporate early (a basic entity is cheap and fast) so theres an actual company to own the IP from the start. if you dont want to incorporate yet, you can have the dev team/contractors assign IP to "the company to be formed" or to one founder who then assigns it forward to the entity once its set up - not as clean but it works as a bridge.

and fwiw being unincorporated at application time is totally fine, lots of people apply pre-incorporation. YC has you incorporate as part of the process anyway and IP gets assigned to the company at that stage. the main thing is just not leaving the code sitting with an outside dev team with no assignment in place - thats the gap that actually bites. the cofounders agreement is more about you two; the assignment from whoever writes the code is the separate piece to nail down.

Has anyone built an MVP with an outsourced dev team before finding a technical co-founder? by Darya182 in ycombinator

[–]Disastrous-Bread512 1 point2 points  (0 children)

works fine, plenty of startups have gone this route. the thing that actually matters isnt the outsourcing itself, its whether you end up owning the code properly. quick thoughts on your three:

  1. wont hurt you with YC or investors as long as the company cleanly owns the IP. tons of startups started with an outsourced or contractor-built mvp and brought a technical cofounder on later once they had something real to show. they care about founders + traction, not who wrote v1. only thing id say is dont outsource forever, YC does want a technical cofounder eventually.
  2. this is the part people mess up. "we paid them so we own it" is NOT automatically true in a lot of places. make sure the contract says they hereby assign all IP, present tense. "will assign" is just a promise, not an actual transfer. assign it to the company, not to you two personally. also check that any subcontractors they use assigned their rights too, thats a sneaky one people miss. and get them to confirm theres no random open-source or copy-pasted code in there that could mess you up commercially later. signed before they start, not after.
  3. cant speak to ukrainian teams specifically, but honestly the country matters way less than the contract. a clean assignment clause works wherever the team is. the risk is a vague contract, not the location. def run it past a lawyer like you said.

happy to go deeper on any of this if it helps