As a non-technical founder/maker, how do you develop your app's backend?

@m0ham3d sure thing: Many reasons why it failed: * Freelancer -> he only wanted to get the job done and get his upwork rating and move on to the next gig * I wasn't clear/sure how the deliverable should have been (in terms of what are the endpoints I need and how should they behave. 4 years later I can specify that) * I didn't have a clear understanding of what should be backend and what should be front-end * I didn't have familiarity running the app (all the npm installs, npm starts and so on were a surprise for me), even though it was on the environment I requested him to use (Google Cloud) Overall I got all the code and I believe the guy did an ok job I just wasn't able to express what I needed and didn't have the skills to handle what I specified as a deliverable (some basic Devops/ server baby sitting skills via the command line). About the code machine, I've read that many times over. The only way is to really get to try it out. I think today all nocode tools promise you pretty much the same thing but in the end you need to try them all and figure the one that works with exactly your usecase. For the same app that I had hired a developer back then (paid him 1k USD for that). I managed to build a similar app using Carrd & Memeberstack. It lacks some customization that was available in the app he coded but, like I said, better to validate the market first rather than have bells and whistles that no one wants :)