You just closed your seed round. Investors are watching. The board wants a demo in 60 days. The pressure to hire fast is real — two senior engineers, a tech lead, maybe a DevOps person. You post the jobs. The interviews start. Three months later, you've burned a significant portion of your runway in salaries, your first hire isn't a fit, and you're still six weeks away from a working MVP. This is the story nobody tells you at YC demo day. Hiring is slow, deliberate, and irreversible. And for most funded startups between their seed and Series A, it's the wrong first move — at least not yet.
The Real Cost of a Full Engineering Team
The cost of a full engineering team is rarely just salaries. It's the recruiting cycle — typically three to five months per senior hire. It's the onboarding ramp, during which a new engineer is consuming context, not producing it. It's the management overhead that falls on a founder who should be talking to customers. It's the organizational gravity that makes it harder to pivot when you discover — as nearly every pre-PMF company does — that what you thought you needed to build is not actually what your users need. A full team hired for your month-one thesis will be misaligned by month four. That misalignment compounds.
This isn't a criticism of full-time engineers — they're essential at the right stage. The question is: what is the right stage? For most pre-Series A companies, that stage is after you've validated your core loop, found repeatable revenue, and know with clarity what your technical roadmap looks like for the next 18 months. Until then, you need speed and adaptability — not headcount and hierarchy.
What You Actually Need in the First 12 Months
In the first year, your engineering needs are wildly unpredictable. Month one you need a landing page and a waitlist. Month three you need an MVP with three core features. Month six you're iterating one of those features based on user feedback. Month nine you're integrating an AI component your original spec never mentioned. A full-time team built for month-one requirements will either be underutilized, over-budget, or architecturally wrong by month nine. What you need is elastic capacity — the ability to surge when you need to build fast and shift focus when you need to think. That's not what a fixed team offers. That's what a sprint-based development partner is designed for.
The Argument for a Development Partner at the Seed Stage
A great development partner gives you something a full-time team structurally cannot: zero ramp time, zero management overhead, and accumulated expertise across dozens of similar builds. At The DaaS Labs, we've shipped production SaaS products, Shopify platforms, AI features, and mobile applications for funded startups across multiple verticals. We know where the landmines are. We know which architectural decisions cause pain at scale and which can be safely deferred. That institutional knowledge — available from day one of your engagement — is the kind of advantage that's hard to put a number on, but easy to feel in your sprint velocity.
When You Should Hire Full-Time
We're not anti-hiring — we're anti-premature-hiring. The right time to bring on full-time engineers is when your product is validated, your revenue is repeatable, and you know with precision what your technical roadmap looks like for the next 18 months. At that point, building an internal team makes complete sense and we'll be the first to say so. Use the early stage to validate everything. Use a focused development partner to move fast. Then hire strategically once you know exactly what you're hiring for — and you'll hire better people, for better-defined roles, with a codebase already worth inheriting.
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