First, know or choose which Tech Stack you will use for development. 

As the CEO, CTO, or founder of a startup, you already know that shipping a real product takes more than one developer working alone, and the honest starting point is your tech stack, because it decides almost everything else.

This will have a big impact on the number of developers you need. For example, if you use JavaScript, you will probably need fewer developers than Ruby or some other complex tech stack. Learn why not to use Ruby as a Tech Stack here!

A JavaScript-based stack, covering both the front end and back end in the same language, typically needs fewer developers than a stack that splits the work across separate languages and frameworks, since the same person can move across the whole codebase instead of specialists handing work off to each other.

Don't forget that the most important thing in all this is to make your budget work, you can find out the values of devs in JavaScript on sites like Glassdoor.com.

The real cost question becomes: what does a developer with that skill set actually cost in the market you're hiring from? Glassdoor is a reliable place to check this yourself before you talk to anyone.

• Search a role like "Full Stack JavaScript Developer" together with the region you're hiring in — Colombia, or Latin America more broadly, if you're looking at nearshore talent

• Glassdoor will show you a salary range, usually broken out by experience level, from entry to senior.

• Run that search for two or three seniority levels and you'll have a realistic band to plan around, not a guess.

That seniority choice matters more than it looks like on paper.

It's tempting to save money by hiring junior developers, since their listed salary is the lowest number on the page.

In practice, junior talent usually needs more supervision, produces more rework, and takes longer to reach a shippable result, so the real cost includes your own time and the cost of fixing what has to be redone, not just the paycheck.

And a semi-senior or mid-level full-stack JavaScript developer costs more per hour, but needs far less oversight and tends to get a working product out faster, which is usually the more expensive resource for an early-stage founder to spend: time.

The same logic applies to where you hire. Know our content: Nearshore vs. Offshore: Choose the Most Cost-Effective Option

Nearshore teams, built with developers in Latin America, work inside or close to U.S. business hours, which means real-time collaboration instead of waiting a full day for a reply. Combined with strong English proficiency across the region's tech talent, that overlap removes a lot of the friction that comes with offshore teams working many time zones away, where a single misunderstood requirement can cost you days, not minutes.

2nd: The phase of the project affects the number of developers you need: You may need a few developers to build a prototype or Minimum Viable Product (MVP); this also depends on the maturity leaps of your product. Here is a visual guide to this roadmap.

• The idea stage is just that: an idea, unvalidated, existing only as a hypothesis about a problem worth solving.
  

• A proof of concept is the first real test of that hypothesis — a minimal, often unpolished build that answers one question only: can this actually be built the way we imagine it? It isn't meant for real users yet, and it isn't meant to be pretty.
  

• The prototype comes next, and this is where real people finally interact with the product for the first time, which is the critical event that tells you whether the problem you're solving is a problem anyone else actually has.

3rd: Also, how long will it take you to complete it? If this time is due to a deadline for your product or customer, you should estimate it.

Once you have a tech stack, a seniority level, and a real salary range for it, the calculation itself is simple: divide your available budget by the average annual cost of one developer at that level, and the result is roughly how many developers your budget supports.

A $100,000 budget against an average cost of $50,000 per developer supports two developers for a year — the same logic scales up or down depending on your actual numbers.

From there, the harder and more useful question is how those developers' time gets distributed across the features and maturity jumps still ahead of you, which is exactly what a real project estimate should account for.

If you want a real number instead of a rough one, talk it through with our CTO — a no-obligation consultation is the fastest way to see how your budget translates into an actual team.

Schedule your free consultation today!

And let's improve your product together!