Bill Myers - February 12, 2010

One of the important things to learn as a product developer, is you won't always be able to do everything yourself. In those cases, it can pay to use a freelancer or subcontractor. But to protect your project and secrets, always require a non disclosure agreement. Find one here

One of the important things to learn as a product developer, is you won't always be able to do everything yourself.

In some instances, you'll find it far more productive to outsource certain tasks to freelancers or subcontrators.

Doing this will expand the kind of products you are able to produce, usually in a shorter period of time, and often result in a better overall experience for your customers.

Of course, some product developers still prefer to do all the work on their products themselves.

But, some of the most successful people I know, use freelancers and subcontractors to develop all the products they sell.

This gives them time to work on what they do best (usually marketing), while still keeping a steady stream of new products in the pipeline.

Whether you use rarely use freelancers or use them all the time, the one thing you will want is a good Non Disclosure Agreement for the freelancer to sign, before you give them full details about the product.

This will discourage the freelancer from sharing your ideas or secrets with the world, and give you legal recourse should they do so.

If you have an attorney, you can have him (or her) draw a generic non-disclosure agreement you can use with your subcontractors.

Or, you can find several ready-to-use NDA (non disclosure agreement) contracts online.

One that seems to be pretty good is available for free download from the SCORE web site at http://www.score.org/downloads/NonDisclosureAgreement.pdf

That agreement is a pdf file, so if it opens in your browser, use the disk icon in your PDF reader to save it.

You may not need a NDA today, but chances are if you produce products, you'll eventually need one.