Letting go

The start always begins with an MVP (minimum viable product), whether you’re programming with a couple of others, or flying solo, what matters for the next few months is building that MVP as quickly as possible, and getting users to actually use the product. The all-nighters, the pressure from stakeholders, the roller coaster of emotions, they all fade away when you see a customer actually benefiting from the product you’ve built. It’s hard to describe that moment, but it takes your breath away.

Something you’ve built from an idea you had over a coffee with a couple of friends, then a few months later, to a product that someone somewhere in the world is getting value from. That’s a powerful feeling, humbling yet euphoric. From now on you want to do everything possible to make that user, and the next wave of users using the product, as happy as they can be.

During those early days, you can wear a lot of hats, and that works well at the time…

The problem is the momentum of the company accelerates, like a snowball racing down a mountain. When the user base increases 1000x, support tickets flood your inbox, feature requests come in thick and fast, meanwhile there’s the pressure to ensure the product can scale to handle the unknown load. The more important your product becomes, the more hats there are to wear.

When we started Tapdaq, I was the only programmer in the team, and I had to develop the iOS SDK, the server-side ad delivery, and the dashboard. There were a lot of hats to wear, and it was an intense amount of work to do (on top of this, there was my final year of uni to contend with). We were marching as fast as we could to product validation; getting enough users gaining value from our product, Ted and Dom hustled up enough interest so we could raise our seed round and take the business to the next level.

When that happened, we had a whole heap of features we wanted to work on, but the code I hacked together wasn’t sustainable moving forward, so we brought in amazing talent such as Honza Stepanovsky and Jan Losert to rebuild our dashboard from scratch.

At this point, when you feel things are getting harder, and there’s no letting up, when life is completely eclipsed by work, it’s time to expand the team.

If you’re thinking “ah I could just eek out another few hours a week to cover that extra work”, or that new members of your team will ruin “your baby”, this isn’t healthy, and yet a normal reaction to have. You’re now in a situation where your surrounded by a lot of activity that is difficult to keep track of, you’ve taken VC money and there’s a race to hockey-stick growth. Its sometimes difficult to keep your head above the water, but the show must go on, expectations of the product have never been higher.

You may not be the best person to do..

To continue executing well, you need exceptional talent on board, but i have some more bad news, you may not be the best person to do X, and getting help from reliable individuals is going to make your product even better.

Figure out what the weaknesses are in the company, some technical skills might not be up to scratch, or not there at all. Hire with those attributes in mind.

Look for T-shaped individuals. These are the sort that are excellent at one skill (ideally the skill your lacking in the team), but also has a wealth of skills they are good at.

Always hire people who you feel are smarter than you, and give them the autonomy to make decisions. If you’ve hired well, the ship will keep sailing without your constant involvement, well done! This means you’ve found reliable people, which is a rarity.

Thinking ahead

Now that you’ve got to a stage where the day-to-day is (mostly) taken care of, start thinking about how you can best add value, remember your time is valuable. Take a step back from time to time and look at the bigger picture. Some questions in the back of your mind should be:

• What do we need to have validated in 6 months time?
• What tools do we need to decide on?
• How can we get 10x performance on our critical applications?
• How close are we to reaching our targets by the end of the quarter?

This is territory I myself have entered into for about a year or so now, it takes some getting used to, and letting go is not easy, but at some point it has to happen. Trust your team, and make sure they keep you well informed.