Contracting out development work for the MVP(Minimum Viable Product)

Three-time founder here. One of those times was building a successful agency, so I've seen all of this from both sides.

Do not outsource your MVP, period.

Your MVP should be your core competancy, so you're really asking "should I outsource my core competancy?"

If I was a potential investor in your idea, I would then be right to ask myself, "wait, what do I need this guy for? what exactly is he bringing to the table, ideas?" (there would be a lot of evil cackling now because ideas are worth nothing without execution)

You really have two choices if you want to build something that counts as "viable": either learn enough about development that you and your founders can push something real enough to prove customer demand yourselves, or you hire a small team - either co-founders or first employees - that will build the MVP, in-house.

It's really very simple: no successful company can be zipped up and delivered after the final payment. The website or whatever is only about 10% of the equation. The people who built the tech need to be a vital part of the company, they need to understand and be able to justify every decision that was made to build the UI/UX, why the combination of backend technologies was chosen over all the others. Those people need to work alongside the folks responsible for marketing, selling, supporting it. You are building a culture and a history, even if during COVID it's mostly happening over Zoom.

Perhaps most critically: you're delusional if you think that a 3rd-party is ever, ever going to care about, understand, obsess over the details of your idea as the people whose literal livelihood depend on it being successful.

Now, am I arguing against hiring help for your team? Certainly not - I ran an agency, after all! But I can be realistic about when it makes sense: you have launched your MVP, customers are paying you for it and you now need to move faster or access domain experts that you can't yet afford to hire. For example, you can work with a design agency to help polish your look. Or perhaps you need to work with someone who is really good at setting up a deployment pipeline, or maybe you reach a point where you can bring on outside help to implement a module that wasn't a key feature when you first launched, like historical invoices or something.

And no, crypto isn't a special category in this regard. Unless by crypto, you mean "unserious and low-stakes; not a 100-year company"... which is not the vibe you want to hear about as an investor, an employee or a customer.

If you are building a company that does X, you can't outsource the freaking X. There's no indie hack. You have to own X or there's no company.

(It's insane that the other comments have talked so much about where to get cheaper labor. If you're building a real company that has customers and investors, you will not be looking to save a few grand by outsourcing to a cheaper country. Look at every successful company and you'll realize that exactly none of them were started by outsourcing to Ukraine.)

I wrote about my experience outsourcing dev for my MVP - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/lessons-ive-learned-outsourcing-development-dae0e830e6

Biggest issue going forward is that you can only move as fast as you can pay.
Also, I recommend getting a technical advisor just to check on the development & proposals to make sure it all looks good.

I partially partially contracted the work out and had both good and bad experiences. My conclusion was to avoid agencies - except if you have enough money - because they are much more expensive: 50-150% higher prices. I also found it useful to agree on a hourly rate instead of a project price and ask them to fill a time reporting spreadsheet with that I was able to catch people who tried to overcharge (he reported 8 times more than he worked). Even if you do a project based billing ask them to give an estimate and ask them how much time they are going to spend. With that you can roughly calculate the hourly cost. With this I dodged a designer who tried to negotiate for 10 times the normal price. Yes and try to figure out the market price for the are your contractor work: In the US it is ok to charge 100-200 $/h but in Ukraine 20-30 $/h is much more reasonable. You have to figure out the tax situation too: if you hire from abroad then check if there is tax treaty in place and who and where should pay taxes. If you go with a freelancer.com or similar they will take care of this. However they charge some fee. Another important thing is IP, get an IP assignment template and ask them to sign it in advance so that you can avoid getting sued later.
Hope this helped!