- Having a cofounder statistically increases chances of success
- You can learn to program yourself, at least enough to get the ball rolling
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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the general idea is that the CTO should help you manage dev resources not be the dev resources.
The reasons for this are extremely numerous, but two are:
- you want the CTO incentivized to keep costs down. you cant do this if they are rewarded for their individual time and effort
- your CTO will be 10x in their area of understanding, and terrible in most others. Thus they should be delegating and managing to the real 10x resources
Plus, dozens of more compelling reasons :)
No wait what. No no no no no.
At the start, coder code, businessman business.
Your 'CTO' is just heads down making whatever is needed. You don't need to be 10x when you're building out a prototype from duct tape and elastic bands.
We can disagree on that. I've done 2 startups. One is past Series A, and I did the method above. The second, I tried to cody code, and for reasons above it failed.
In the early stages, the problem is, the CTO's job is extremely diverse, and the business job is focused. As time progresses, the trend reverses (Business becomes diverse, tech becomes focused.). Day one is a good example:
Choose the best tech stack. Even from there, in the failure example, I spent weeks on tech selection, getting it wrong. However, in the Series A company, we tossed 5K at a handful of experts.
So my advice to all tech people starting out, is to discover and leverage expert talent, not to be the expert.
Coming from the tech side just wondering what's the thoughts of others.
Where do you draw the line of being the product person.
Ofc this is speaking from getting from 0-1 where you are still proving the product is feasible. Ofc the clear answer is that the tech co-founder would advise what is not technically feasible. But just building a MVP and testing if people are willing to pay shouldn't take that long especially with so many non-technical tools out there to help build right?(ofc with exception like one of the other comments that MVP took 12months)
Then in the normal scenario wouldn't a tech co-founder be needed only after the MVP stage?
While many try to approach it with the mindset of holding tight to your shares, for most people that will just jeopardize their chances of success.
"33% of something big is better than 100% of nothing"
A technical project won't get very far if you don't have expertise internally that would mean long term full time employees or a technical founder from day 1.
"It's quite hard to start a shoe repair business if you can't repair shoes yourself".
While building a tech product requires many skillsets, the main one required for an MVP being: Viable and Product.
- Viable: You'll need someone that can generate large amount of money without a product.
- Minimum Product: You'll need someone that can create a minimum product without much money
These two constraints are why a technical cofounder is almost a requirement otherwise costs for your product will quickly skyrocket way beyond reason and way before you have any kind of revenues.
Given your question: you don't have 1M$+ to start your company with VC friends that'll pour in 5M$ in a year or two. You won't be able to "buy" your way into a product, you have nowhere near enough money.
Our M[V]P (without the viable part) building took 12 months with 2 full time dev as founders. In our jobs we left (the 3 of us) were paid 12k€ (dev) 10k€ (dev) and 10k€ (biz) monthly.
if you were to pay 20k€ montly to have an MVP in about a year it would mean you are a PO of some kind. But it would still mean 250k€ for your MVP if you are an experienced PO. Myself as a senior dev, if I were to hire people it'd have been at least 1M€.
Startups need time in order to become successful, to find customers, get feedback, find partnerships until finally you become profitable. A 10k€/month burden might cripple your chances of success if you start small, you'll have to start BIG.
Apologies if this comes across as strong, but as a technical person that is consistently being approached to be a "CTO" I feel like I need to clear some things up.
> An alternative would be to hire a cofounder to do that... as a "free software engineer"
This is not an alternative, full stop. To make someone provide services they usually charge for is a form of manipulation. Having a cofounder is not a technique for achieving access to free labor.
A cofounder is a partner, and even though their share of duties are on the technical side, they need to be viewed as an equal in responsibilities such as decision making, product direction, fund raising, etc. They should be excited to work on the problem that is present. If you already have a vision for the product in terms of what you think should be built by the "cofounder", then you are looking for an employee, not a cofounder. And this is okay, if not better! The relationship between employe(e/r) is far more clear to both parties.
Noob here, thought I’d share my insight…
I watched an episode of shark tank and the pitch was a Saas app.
The founder had no tech background and tech developer was on payroll I think. The sharks advice was to make the tech developer a cofounder. Main reason is the tech developer now has the drive to put all their energy into the product their creating. No one works harder than the founders because they have everything to lose and gain.
Hope this helps 😁
All about the people. Don't think of a skillset or title equates to leadership and project management. You can be a skilled developer and a founder and ruin a good project. Food for thought when evaluating who to bring on.
Great question! Both options have their merits. A technical co-founder brings passion and commitment, but you're right about the equity cost. On the flip side, hiring a senior developer might be like having a personal MVP magician on board, but make sure they're ready for the leadership hat. It's a tough call, but as they say, 'In startups, it's not about the right choice, but the ability to make a choice right.' Good luck with your decision! PS: try out rocketdevs.com , i hired a dev from here, they're pretty nice :)