There are three ways to build a new venture: hire a team, outsource to an agency, or co-develop with a practice. Most founders default to one without weighing the other two. The right choice depends on how settled the thing you are building actually is.
Every new venture faces the same early question and rarely treats it as a real decision: who builds it. There are three answers. Hire a founding team and build in-house. Outsource the build to an agency. Or co-develop with a practice that shapes the product and systems from the inside and takes a stake in the outcome.
Founders usually default to whichever answer their background makes familiar, then discover its limits a year in. It is worth choosing deliberately, because the three are good at different things, and the deciding factor is not cost. It is how settled the thing you are building actually is.
Hiring: right when you know what you are building
Building in-house is the default ambition, and eventually the right one. A permanent team owns the product, accrues the knowledge, and compounds over years. Nothing else builds durable capability the way hiring does.
It is also slow and unforgiving early. You are recruiting senior people to build something not yet defined, betting on a thesis they had no part in shaping. If the direction is still moving, and at formation it always is, you spend your first year and your first hires discovering what you should have decided before you hired them.
Outsourcing: right for defined work, wrong for undefined
An agency is built to deliver against a brief. Give it a clear specification and it will execute efficiently. That is genuinely useful for work whose shape is already settled: a known integration, a defined app, a redesign.
An agency delivers against a brief. A new venture’s problem is that it does not yet have one.
A new venture’s problem is that it does not yet have a stable brief. The product thesis, the commercial model, and the architecture are all still forming, and they will keep moving as you learn. Hand that to a team paid to deliver to a spec and you get exactly what you asked for, which is rarely what the venture needed by the time it ships. The incentive is to close the ticket, not to get the venture right.
Co-development: right when the shape is still forming
Co-development sits between the two. A practice works inside the venture, shaping the product and the systems as they form rather than executing a fixed brief, and takes a bounded portfolio stake so its incentives sit with the outcome instead of the invoice.
That alignment is the point. When the builder holds a stake, the pressure is to make the venture succeed, not to bill hours or close a scope. It suits exactly the phase hiring and outsourcing handle badly: early, when the thesis is open and the structural decisions that will define the venture are still on the table.
It is not permanent. Good co-development builds toward a team that can carry the work, and hands over. The stake keeps the practice invested; the handover keeps the venture independent.
How to choose
Ask one question first: how settled is what you are building?
If the direction, model, and architecture are clear and stable, hire the team that will own it, or outsource the defined pieces. If the shape is still forming and the early structural decisions carry the most risk, co-development gives you senior product and systems judgement inside the venture, with incentives aligned to the result, without committing to permanent headcount before you know what you need.
What we recommend
Do not pick by cost or habit. Pick by certainty. The more open the venture still is, the more you want a builder whose incentives are tied to getting it right rather than getting it shipped. Early, that usually means co-development. As the venture settles and durable capability becomes the priority, it means hiring the team that will hold it for the long run. The mistake is using the instrument built for one phase to do the job of another.