To what extent to "micromanage" freelance contractors? entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

As a novice to hiring freelance programmers, I'm looking for some constructive feedback.

The Issue: I recently had an unsatisfactory experience hiring a freelance programmer. This person claimed he could get a job done in 3-4 weeks for ~$12K. After 2 months the person got it 90% complete. By month 3 it was still about 95% complete. At this point the freelance programmer quit because he had other projects that were more important.

The project itself was very complex (and the freelance contractor was incredibly smart), and so it's totally possible no "blame" ought to be assigned to anyone. That said, I suspect this outcome partially came about because I was a total novice to freelance hiring and didn't "manage" the process properly. Here's how I conducted myself throughout the process:

• Once every 1-2 days I would ask how the project was going. Usually I would get a short answer that seemed reasonable. Every week or so a new commit got uploaded to the repo with a lot of new functionality added.
• I am a technical person myself so didn't have a barrier of communication preventing me from understanding what was being worked on. I never felt like I was being "bullshitted" -- but maybe I'm naive?
• Towards the end of the project it felt like the project was constantly "a few days away" from being finished. This lasted for weeks. I myself believed the project was days away from completion just looking at the code, but alas the final product was never delivered.
• I paid the freelancer in terms of milestone payments (not cash upfront). About 95% of the money was paid.

Question: I feel like I treated this project too much like a black box: "money in, product out". The end result was a 2-month past due project that never got finished. Should I have "micromanaged" it more? Should I have paid more? Does anyone have any advice?

submitted by /u/eeg_bert
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