The CTO survival guide — 6 things it takes to succeed in a startup studio

It has been 100 days since I took on the role of CTO at Obeyo, a co-living platform aimed at enhancing community interaction — and a portfolio venture of Builders Studio in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Being the technical co-founder of a startup is a remarkable experience, especially for someone that operates as part of a start-up studio. It is vastly different from being a tech leader within a large company.

Having co-founded 2 companies in the past, working in a studio configuration came with a different set of characteristics. I thought I’d share my reflections, experiences, and learnings from my first 3 months at Obeyo and Builders.

My life before Obeyo

I started my first business while in university. It began as a two-man endeavour where we would build websites and Web applications for companies. After graduating, I continued working this way with my friend, and eventually, it turned into a small agency with 4 partners. With this team, we founded a SaaS startup, Shipright, where we focused on helping software businesses understand users better by aggregating feedback. As part of this, we built and nurtured a community and continuously stayed in touch with users.

So when the opportunity to join Obeyo and Builders presented itself, it was very appealing, since Obeyo is similarly driven by building communities. I could still work in a start-up environment (which I enjoy) while having more support and a larger team. What also drew me to Obeyo is that the foundations were already there, and my role would be to take a well-thought-out but early-stage idea further, rather than starting from scratch.

the beginnings of each product shape look something like this

The day-to-day at a startup studio

Our product work at Builders is organised in 2-week cycles. This allows us to prototype and test the product extremely fast. So it will come as no surprise to anyone that as a CTO for a young venture, most of your time will be spent on coding. As a team, we spend some time defining and organising our work. That takes up roughly 10% of my weekly workload. Another 30% of my time goes into researching, communicating with users, and generating ideas for what we should build.

As we want to iterate and build a product fast, I think a big advantage of being in the studio is that it takes over some of the less fun parts (for me) like finance, marketing, and HR. In my previous startups, I would spend time trying to find new users, doing sales calls, and customer support, trying to build landing pages and other small tasks that would end up on my plate because we had to get them done. I wasn’t super happy doing some of these things on the side because it’s not my thing. What I enjoy most is building an amazing product and creating value for users.

My time is much more streamlined and focused this way.

Must-have characteristics to thrive as CTO in a startup studio

The studio environment is fast-paced — really fast-paced. You have a team that both supports you and pushes you to get results. Unlike working on your startup or a passion project individually, if you discover that some part of your plan is not working, you just need to adapt or throw the plan away and make a new one. Decisions are made rationally and you cannot have an emotional attachment to certain ideas that may not work in the end.

know when and how to pick your battles

To thrive in this environment, a CTO should have a hybrid of business and technical talent. I believe these traits are critical:

1. Let go of expectations: All parts of the business and the idea that you are chasing are subject to change. At any point in time, you might have to change tactics of running your startup, the product, the types of users you’re chasing, or even the composition of your team. You need to create structure, but at the same time, be a bit scrappy. You cannot invest too much time in doing a single thing because it might change anyway. This brings me to my next point.
2. Become deeply acquainted with your users: One of the most important things an early-stage startup can do is spend time with its users. This responsibility cannot be delegated to a single team member, and as a CTO you will not be spared — in fact, it will be one of your more important tasks. At Obeyo, we set up a pioneer group of users who are our early adopters. It helps us save time because we don’t have to recruit new users for every testing stage. We talk to them every two weeks. That works really well because we have a constant inflow of feedback while we’re building the product. Usually, the next day we’ll be updating a design, and then the week after we actually implement it. This gets things moving very fast and it keeps us in the loop with what real users experience. It also prevents our assumptions from getting stale.
3. Ditch hyper-fixation: Part of building fast is continuously iterating. One of the things that are essential in a startup is to limit the time to feedback by setting up efficient feedback loops. What you want to avoid is chasing an idealised version of a product that is in your vision, before early releases pass the scrutiny of real users. So whenever you have an idea, execute it as soon as possible. Get it out, get some feedback and see if you should invest more time in that direction or not. It’s an absolute no-go to spend six months building something, only to then find out that no one cares.
4. Maintain time efficiency: In more mature companies, what often happens is that the time to get product iterations worked out gets longer and longer. Due to higher levels of specialisation among team members, a project gets passed to the next team at every stage of development. Design, user research and its consequent stages can take multiple weeks or months to complete. In a startup environment, everything has to happen on a shorter timeline. We work in 2-week discovery cycles which require all these steps to be coordinated and completed. It is definitely intense, and as a CTO, you have to be comfortable not just with coding but also with doing user testing and other tasks.
5. Come with a strong technical background: You should be okay with getting your hands dirty. Product building will be your responsibility entirely — from start to finish. The studio team is there to provide advice and support, but they work on multiple ventures at the same time, so they cannot do all the heavy lifting of creating a product from scratch while you sit back.
6. Be okay with juggling in-house stakeholders: The main advantage of the studio model is that you have access to in-house expertise. Marketing efforts, financial management, and fundraising can be partially outsourced. However, this does not mean unconditional support or a complete shift of responsibilities. Therefore, setting expectations, communicating efficiently and managing relationships with the different in-house teams are all extremely important. You need to be able to align on goals very clearly, prioritise work and be transparent with your intentions. Therefore, having systems and tools in place, and documenting everything helps enormously.

Obeyo’s operator dashboard and app

My key takeaways

If I were to pick 2 key pieces of advice for those thinking of joining a startup studio similar to Builders in a technical cofounder position it would be these:

Firstly, and I cannot emphasise this enough, make sure that you spend time with the users and get to know them, get to know their issues and get to know the space. Try to do at least one customer conversation every week. It is extremely easy to fall back on coding all day, but you need to understand the problems your users are facing and the way they interact with your product.

Secondly, make sure that you choose a stack that allows you to be flexible and build things fast. It should be solid enough that you don’t end up creating too much technical debt. At the same time, you have to be ready for regular functional changes. Therefore, picking a stack that you and the team are familiar with helps a lot. At Obeyo, we use React and Next.js for our operator Web app and APIs, deployed on Vercel with edge hosting. We use Expo / React Native for mobile apps and Prisma for DB management.

Last words

I hope that these insights have set clearer expectations for those of you thinking about taking up a CTO position in a fast-paced startup environment. There are many opportunities in this ecosystem, as is often the case with software-based startups. If my startup studio experience sounds appealing, take a look at this list of studios around the world.

Of course, at Builders, we are always looking for technical co-founders to jump on board as the studio is growing and expanding its portfolio of companies. If the role resonates with you, feel free to connect with me personally. If you are interested in building B2B SaaS companies that impact the future of work and living, Builders is the studio you’re looking for.

Lastly, in case you would like to keep up with future developments at Builders, you can subscribe to the newsletter here.