“The best time to discover a development company's weaknesses is during the sales conversation, not six months into the build.”
Every founder who has had to restart a projectWhy Most Due Diligence Falls Short
Most founders evaluate development companies the wrong way. They look at portfolio aesthetics, check company size, read a few Google reviews, and make a decision. Then they sign a contract and spend the next several months discovering that the agency has strengths in design but no real backend depth, or that the team they met during sales is not the team that will build their product.
Good due diligence on a development partner is not about catching liars - most agencies are not dishonest. It is about finding misalignments in expertise, process, and expectations before they cost you time and money. The questions in this post are designed to surface those misalignments quickly, in a first or second conversation, before you are emotionally committed to a particular vendor.
Ask these questions directly. A good development company will not be put off by them - they will be glad you asked, because it means they can set expectations correctly. A company that hedges, deflects, or gives vague answers to specific questions is telling you something important.
Questions About Their Process
How do you handle scope changes mid-project? This is the single most revealing process question. Every project encounters scope changes. What you are probing for is whether the agency has a formal change request process, whether those changes are priced and agreed before work begins, and whether they have a track record of keeping scope-changed projects on budget. "We're flexible" is not a good answer. A documented change order process is.
What does your discovery phase look like? Discovery - the phase where requirements are detailed, the architecture is planned, and the timeline is locked - is where projects are won or lost. Agencies that skip discovery in favor of going straight to build are optimizing for speed of contract signing, not quality of delivery. A good discovery phase takes two to four weeks and produces a specification document and a fixed-price quote.
- How do you handle a situation where the build is behind schedule - what does your communication process look like?
- What project management tool will we use and how often will we see updates?
- Do you work in sprints? How long are they and what does the demo process look like?
- What is your policy when a developer on our project leaves the company mid-engagement?
- Who is our single point of contact and how quickly do they respond to questions?
Questions About Their Team
Who specifically will work on our project? This question separates agencies that are honest from agencies that bait-and-switch. You want names, not titles. Ask to meet the lead developer and the designer who will be assigned to your project. If the answer is "we haven't decided yet" or "it depends on availability," that is a risk factor - it means your project may be staffed with whoever is available, not whoever is best suited.
Do you use offshore developers and if so, how is that managed? There is nothing wrong with offshore development - some of the best developers in the world are in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and Latin America. The issue is when agencies present a local team during sales and build with a different offshore team without transparency. Ask directly, and ask how time zone differences are managed for communication and code review.
Questions About Their Technical Approach
Questions About Their Commercial Track Record
Can you share two or three references from clients with similar projects? A portfolio shows you what they built. A reference tells you how they behaved when things went wrong. Ask the references specifically: did the project come in on time and on budget? How did the agency handle problems? Would you hire them again and if so, why?
What was the most difficult project you have delivered and what made it difficult? This question is gold because it forces the agency to be honest about their limits. A company with real experience will have a genuine answer. A company that has only done straightforward work will struggle to answer meaningfully. Listen for what kind of difficulty they describe - technical complexity, client communication, unclear requirements - and decide whether their pattern of problems is one you can live with.
Questions About Cost and Commercial Terms
Is this a fixed-price or time-and-materials contract? Fixed-price contracts protect you from runaway costs but require a locked scope. Time-and-materials contracts are flexible but require strong project management on your side to avoid overruns. Neither is universally better - but you need to understand which model you are signing and what your exposure is if the project runs long.
What is the payment schedule and what are the milestones it is tied to? Good payment schedules are tied to working software delivered at specific milestones - not to calendar dates or arbitrary percentages of project completion. You should never pay more than 25 to 30% upfront, and each subsequent payment should be triggered by a demo of working software, not just time elapsed.
- Ask for a breakdown of the quote by phase - design, backend, frontend, QA - not just a total number
- Ask what is explicitly excluded from the quoted price
- Ask whether the quote includes deployment, app store submission, and post-launch bug fixing
- Ask what the process is if you want to pause or cancel the project mid-way
- Ask whether there is a warranty period after launch and what it covers
The Meta-Question Behind All of These
Beneath every specific question is one meta-question: does this company behave like a partner or a vendor? A vendor takes your brief, executes it, and invoices you. A partner challenges your brief when it needs challenging, tells you when your timeline is unrealistic, and cares whether the product you build actually works in the market.
The difference shows up in small ways during the sales conversation. Does the agency push back on anything you said? Did they ask about your users, your business model, or your distribution strategy - or did they jump straight to tech stack and timelines? Did they explain why they recommended a particular approach, or did they just tell you what you wanted to hear?
At Zovintra, we start every potential engagement with a scoping call where we ask more questions than we answer. If your requirements are unclear, we say so before quoting. If your timeline is unrealistic, we say so before signing. If your existing codebase - whether it was built with a previous agency, an AI tool like Lovable or Bolt, or an internal team - has problems that will affect the build, we document them upfront. It is a slower way to start a conversation, but it is the only way to deliver a project both sides can be proud of.
