How I found a team for Alldone.app

In my last article about Alldone.app i bravely stated that it is totally doable to build the venture on the side because you “only need 3–5 people for 3–5 months for the initial MVP”. Sounds great but how do i get this team?

Let’s do some math how much of a team i can afford: Let’s say I want to invest only as much into Alldone so it does not endanger my “way of life”. Remember I want to set this up for the long term — if investing in Alldone really hurts me financially than there is a big risk that I will stop it on the first signs of trouble. One way of thinking about this is to invest the yearly bonus — or any other amount which you don’t need in your regular monthly expenses (including holidays etc.). Let’s say as an example for me the yearly amount of “free cash flow” is 50k EUR which makes around 4k EUR / month in a year.

So if you want to have a team of at least 3 people (2 engineers, 1 designer) you can only spend 1–1.5k EUR per person per month. This is obviously not enough to pay somebody good in Germany, the US or any other high wage country.

If you are lucky you know some students who are willing to give it a try while also getting some shares. Ideally you find actual co-founders who are willing to work for that money or don’t need money at all because they make a similar calculation than you do. Unfortunately I did not have this luck... yet. I will write another article about “how to find co-founders” once i have figured it out :)

So who would do it for the money I have available now? Obviously I do need people to work on it full-time or it’s never gonna be finished.

One option is to go into low(er)-wage countries and find great people there. I first tried Eastern Europe but unfortunately for me (and luckily for them) rates seem to be too high already there for my purpose. At least what you get on Upwork and the likes you find agencies more in the range of 3–4K / month / person if you go the agency route. I am sure you can find individual people for less but then you need to be really good in selecting the right people and lucky to find them.

My search strategy was:

• Use my network by posting on linkedin
• Talk to people directly
• Search on Upwork & co
• What did i miss? :) Please let me know!

In the end what worked for me was the linkedin post. A friend from my hometown actually contacted me and reminded me about the dev-shop in Cuba (!) he is part of. Funnily those guys had visited me in Berlin a few months ago so i even knew them personally. I had not considered them because Cuba was just not on my radar as a location for a dev-shop — but now I am working with them and I am pretty happy so far. They have reasonable hourly rates, a great team and part of their work will be invested which further reduces the cash flow requirements… and increases their motivation to do a great job. The deal is as follows:

• We agreed on a specific hourly rate as a calculation base
• 50% of this hourly rate will be paid in cash monthly, 50% invested at a certain valuation. With this i can have 3 people working for me within my monthly budget.
• A potential payout of this investment is linked to a liquidity event of Alldone and a corresponding payout for me — so we sit in the same boat
• They will invoice based on the actual work done (e.g. saying they spent x hours for this feature) on a monthly basis

Currently a designer works for me and hopefully soon the engineers will start. We do a weekly sprint demo remotely just as you would expect … and I am looking forward to visiting them in Cuba in person :) I will keep you posted how things will go with them! Also please let me know if you have other good ideas — i am always interested to find good people for Alldone :)

Please also check out the other articles about Alldone.app here.