There's a "who's hiring" freelancer version
Most of my team is based in eastern Europe so they are a bit more affordable than US / UK prices, but skilled ones are never cheap.
But to answer your questions:
> How do you go about it without getting burned?
The only way we found is via personal recommendations. You might be lucky with your first contact with a random, but could as well be unlucky.
> Do you go to a dev shop, or make a team of individual ones?
Either works, but I think going for a dev shop is a bit better because you know the team already knows how to work together, so there is a lot less initial friction.
NEVER EVER go with a dev shop. High prices, bad people and the worse they won't care at all and can never become your co founder. Your thing will be doomed from the start.
Why a team? How about just one.
> where do you find effective and affordable freelancers?
upwork.com
Ideally you'll have good requirements for what you want. If it's a web product create a wireframe. If you can create a clickable HTML wireframe even better.
If there's an open source equivalent just use that.
Something things I've found important.
1) Hire at the cheaper end of the devs your looking at. I've found within price/experience bands, price and quality are not correlated. I prefer to hire at the lower end of expectation, then if a dev shows themself as good, give them an solid pay bump early, like 3/4 months into working together. This way you get a good person, and someone that knows you will look after them as you took the pay rise to them.
2) Fire fast. By nature I like to work things out and help people but if people have troubles early, move them on fast, its most likely going to get worse and you'll beat your head against a a wall trying to fix them and it will take from the project.
3) Document the shit out of what you need + do a dummy visual version. When things get to the pointy end its too easy to get to arguments about what you agree, what you agreed means, or what is 'expected' even if not stated specifically. A dummy version helps sort a bunch of this out - it adds extra but will really help over doing more written notes and key screens only plus helps you plan your product better.
4) Clear payment milestones. Make it fair but you need real deliverables for each payment so you can get what you paid for.
5) Leave at least 30% for extras. No matter how much you plan it out, you'll find extras as you go.
I highly recommend against Freelancers or people who will have no future skin in the game. Instead, you need to try and get some type of Prototype built yourself (may be with some help) and then look for a CTO/Co-founder.
Ok, so what can you do to find a CTO:
- Do Wireframes or mockups of your idea (use something like Whimsical or any other mockup tool. Personally I am a big fan of Whimsical and use it daily to mock ideas)
- Get it designed using something like Figma. May be use a Designer Freelancer for that. That's ok
- Put up a landing page using a website builder. Talk about the idea there. Create a signup list if you can.
- Get busy on social media like twitter/linkedin
Do all of these and you may be able to attract a good CTO. The point is to do enough things first to attract the tech co-founder.
Again, do not pay freelancers to build an application unless you really have no leads even after doing all the steps I mentioned above. You will thank me later.