Creating and innovative thinking, relevant skills in the industry, and domain expertise are the core skills you should look for when employing a freelance developer. Let's look at each of these in bit more detail:

1. Creative and innovative thinking

Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a creative process, and you need people in your team with a high creativity quotient and good problem-solving skills. In today's competitive world, the tech product you will be launching has to be at least 3X to 10X better than the current alternatives your customer is using or currently available in the market.

To build a 3x to 10x better product, each team member needs to think in a higher order. Your potential customer should see your innovation and creativity in every aspect of your tech product, operations, and sales approach.

To gauge the freelancer's creativity quotient, ask open-ended questions like “What was the last thing you created on your own?” and “Why did you choose to create what you created?” The kind of person you need on your team is someone who has developed something on their own and has given it shape and form in the real world.

2. Industry and domain expertise

Depending on the complexity of the product you are developing, domain expertise is a must for mid to high-level, complex products. Consider this: if you are developing something in FinTech and the developer has expertise in developing a tech product in the FinTech domain, he/she will be able to understand the terminologies and lingo you are talking about and probably will be able to contribute more effectively to building the MVP.

But suppose you cannot find a developer with an enterprise in the same domain and industry as you are building your tech product. In that case, it's your responsibility first to make them understand the domain and its terminology.

The second most critical aspect here is to communicate the things you want to get developed in a way that is easy for the developer to understand and develop the product based on that. In the world of agile product development, it's called “User Stories Documentation,” which will have the following components:

1. What problem are we solving, and why are we solving this problem?
2. How will the system behave after this new functionality is developed?
3. Which workflows will be impacted after this functionality is developed?
4. Which user personas will be affected after this functionality is developed?

To achieve this, you must have a product manager in the team if you cannot play that role as a founder.