From experience I will say that you can hire a UX designer even if bootstrapped and low on cash, and that it's a very valuable investment.
Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice.
Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to flesh out into a clickable prototype, then workshop again, then final prototype, can come out within a $5k-$10k budget.
That's 100% worth cutting $5k from your front-end dev budget, and will definitely translate into way more than $5k in user retention gains within the first year.
This is what we did before coding the MVP, and we're doing it again now (at Seed stage) before shipping our biggest upgrade to the product.
Just don't hire them full time as the article seems to suggest is the only choice.
Getting a small firm to go through a design sprint with you with, e.g. designing 3 concepts, letting you run a couple of UX workshops with your potential users, then picking one of the options to flesh out into a clickable prototype, then workshop again, then final prototype, can come out within a $5k-$10k budget.
That's 100% worth cutting $5k from your front-end dev budget, and will definitely translate into way more than $5k in user retention gains within the first year.
This is what we did before coding the MVP, and we're doing it again now (at Seed stage) before shipping our biggest upgrade to the product.