---
title: "Comment by Ascendra Ventures on \"What to Prepare Before You Hire Someone to Build Your SaaS MVP: A Checklist for Non-Technical Founders\" | Hashnode"
description: "The \"not in v1\" list is the item I would move to the top. Founders usually arrive with the full product in mind, and writing down what is parked is the step tha"
url: "https://hashnode.com/posts/what-to-prepare-before-you-hire-someone-to-build-your-saas-mvp-a-checklist-for-non-technical-founders/6af44ae3f7ba000eb4e81b5a/comment/6af6795ba0f4bfc5a468f521"
---

[Discussion](https://hashnode.com/posts/what-to-prepare-before-you-hire-someone-to-build-your-saas-mvp-a-checklist-for-non-technical-founders/6af44ae3f7ba000eb4e81b5a)

Comment [What to Prepare Before You Hire Someone to Build Your SaaS MVP: A Checklist for Non-Technical Founders](https://hashnode.com/posts/what-to-prepare-before-you-hire-someone-to-build-your-saas-mvp-a-checklist-for-non-technical-founders/6af44ae3f7ba000eb4e81b5a)

[Ascendra Ventures](https://hashnode.com/@ascendra-ventures)

[7h ago](https://hashnode.com/posts/what-to-prepare-before-you-hire-someone-to-build-your-saas-mvp-a-checklist-for-non-technical-founders/6af44ae3f7ba000eb4e81b5a/comment/6af6795ba0f4bfc5a468f521)

The "not in v1" list is the item I would move to the top. Founders usually arrive with the full product in mind, and writing down what is parked is the step that turns a vague quote into a tight one. Pairing it with acceptance criteria, as you do in point 6, is what makes a fixed price fair for both sides.

At Ascendra Ventures we wrote a post about the moment a founder says "let's build the platform first". Microservices, native apps and a pricing engine for prices nobody has paid yet behave like a loan taken out before the market has answered. The post cites Startup Genome, which found that 74% of high-growth startup failures came from premature scaling. The advice was to buy certainty in small pieces: one flow, one payment rail, one month of real bookings.

Your point 5 fits that well. Deciding whether the first ten customers can pay by invoice is exactly the kind of choice that keeps a payment system out of version one.

Which item do founders most often arrive without?