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How did you get the idea for your startup?
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Most very early stage companies need a hands on technologist with tech lead, manager or director experience. They need to have sufficient hands on experience to know how to build a well designed product. And they need enough management experience to be able to work productively with non-technicals and customers. Given them the title Lead Developer or Director or something like that (not CTO).
Then pair them with a seasoned CTO as an advisor. The CTO advisor can spend 3-5 hours a month with them keeping them on track. There are plenty of Fractional CTOs that do this sort of advisory work.
Many work individually, but this group has started to build a collective around it with variable levels of support. https://ctorocket.com/
Do you have cash upfront to pay “some guy” or do you want to pay your CTO in equity?
Happy to be your “some guy” if you have funding. ;)
^ Same here haha
A lot of people mistake the first person who is the "founding technologist" to be the CTO. Titles are good, but CTOs are no more expert developers than expert developers somehow magically have people skills, management skills, strategy skills, business skills, and sales skills.
These roles aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but you need to understand that if a founding technologist builds a great MVP, you get funding, and they are forced into a managerial position that becomes more hands-off as the company grows, they may become resentful because their skillset and passion is development and not management.
If you are looking for a 2 in one, make sure the founding technologist is willing to grow with the company and give up development if things go well.
There are also quickly becoming several technology studios designed to partner with early stage founders to help build your first MVP. Unlike outsourcing (which just implements whatever you tell them to) these technology studios are designed to focus on establishing your tech successfully and building a path for you the slowly in-house the work.
Have you heard of arrangements where these technology studios get equity for their continued assistance? For example, founder paid for MVP out of pocket and wants to provide equity for maintenance and V2? And possibly V3. Want to know if this is a normal ask of if this would be problematic?
If you don’t have a technology background, I’d strongly advice to have a co-founder with this knowledge.
Also, every Venture Capitalist that I talk to, are very careful to invest in companies with only one founder.
Thanks all. My notional product is a platform for investors to appraise the non-financial investment attributes of a certain class of assets - think Sim City.
I understand the ‘math’ or logic of how to make it work - I can make partial calculations in Excel. I have someone who can script it in R. But I need someone technical who can take my logic, apply that to very large geospatial datasets and build the front end to be a slick interface. That’s what’ll make it a *product*.
Thanks AD. Yeah i arrived at the same conclusion as you that I need both a data scientist and a developer. I have access to the former, but not the latter.
Right now I’m in explore mode rather than build mode, but appreciate the offer. May get back to you.
Find someone who can handle the tech hiccups as they come. I was a non-technical solo founder with a dev shop that created my mvp. Once the created it, had to find a dude on elance to help with issues that inevitably popped up.
One day the website went down and I called the guy and was like, I can help you on Thursday. It was Monday. That's when I realized I needed some sort of technical partner/lead. Not necessarily a CTO. The title is semantics but you need someone full time who is not a mercenary. You need someone who is going to treat the product as their own. Put money and time into it, not just take money out of the company.
The issue I ran into was every CTO I interviewed wanted to start the product from scratch in the language they were comfortable in when we had a perfectly sound and functional product in RoR. I'd suggest finding someone from the beginning of you can.
Good luck!
Definitely avoid any tech person that says a product should be completely rebuilt (I saw this happen 3 times last week to founders).
All depends on the context. What are your goals, plans to scale, and exit strategy? If you're looking to build a prototype or mvp to raise, outsourcing is fine, but know exactly what you need and be able to communicate it effectively, or you will spend needless money with limited value in return. If you are playing the long game, planning to build something that scales (business & team), and/or a exit strategy that involves a plan to IPO or acquisition, I would add the co-founding CTO or make that an early key hire. Another thing to consider is how much of a role does the tech play in the business? Is it core to what you are doing and leveraging as a business? If so, then you probably want to build and maintain that knowledge in-house. If it's not core to your business, then partnering or outsourcing is fine.
How complicated is your SaaS product? What is a similar product?
Yes, you do need a co-founded being CTO