Am I have a startup founder character? idk :)
I was in chat with some guy, that was interested in our company, and I shared with him a few articles, that I’ve done. I think he decided to squeeze me a bit and send me my questions. I was surprised, and I didn’t realize that this was my questions at the first time.
In order to get more context, you should read this article.
Letter from Anton
I have some questions for you, you don’t have to answer them all, just curious. You might recognize them :)
* Did you work with remote employees before?
* How will you react if your startup will not be able to get 1000 users in 3 months after launch? What will you do?
* Do you have another job, so if your startup will not succeed — you’ll be ok or this is your one shot?
* Where you were working before? What is your experience?
* Are you a first-time co-founder?
* How do you plan to handle a pressure when things will go wrong?
* Do you have code repo and you can share it with me?
* What is the project management software do you use?
* Do you plan to raise investors money when your application will be launched? If yes, why you didn’t raise it before?
* I’m interested to know how do you plan to attract new users. What steps were made by now?
* Did you received a feedback from future users about your product?
My Answers
it’s not a problem to answer them. I’m really open. my experience tells me that I need to share everything with people and then I’ll get same in the back. for sure it’s looking like I have interviewed, but this is not a problem. part of the process :)
haha, it’s my questions. ok, hold on I’ll reply from my Gmail account
Did you work with remote employees before?
Yes. I was an outsourcing company owner. works with people from around the globe, hire people from other countries too
How will you react if your startup will not be able to get 1000 users in 3 months after launch? What will you do?
I’ll cry. because this is really important to me. But my first project GroceriStar was launched and it has 10 users since October. This is why I’m building a team. I want to move from coding to marketing. This is why I start to write articles at Medium, in order to generate more attention.
Do you have another job, so if your startup will not succeed — you’ll be ok or this is your one shot?
I’m not working anywhere. Last 2 years I’m without income. My friends give me the cash. I move from a big town into small in order to reduce costs. Here I know 2 people — granny that owes the flat and guy that fix my monitor. I raised a company before, so at least I understand how to start. If one project will fail — I’ll go with another. I made my choice.
Where were you working before? What is your experience?
I worked 8–10 month as Junior PHP developer at one Ukrainian company. Then I meet my partner and we decided to start our own company. So we build NetWeight company(we built websites for clients). Fun fact today is the day when we registered our account 5–6 years ago. Then we fail our company and decided to make our own products.
Are you a first-time co-founder?
Nope
How do you plan to handle a pressure when things will go wrong?
I love to run. This keeps my head fresh. Or I can drink. I’m prepared to fail. Looking from the pessimistic perspective. It’s an owner habit
Do you have code repo and you can share it with me?
https://github.com/GroceriStar/groceristar, https://github.com/ChickenKyiv/recipe-api-only
What is the project management software do you use?
Right now I track most part at Github. some notes at Asana. Get an advice to go back to Trello. And yeah — I used JIRA and other Atlassian tools before ;)(This guy was a current Atlassian employee)
Do you plan to raise investors money when your application will be launched? If yes, why you didn’t raise it before?
I’m exploring this way. Not a lot of progress right now. I have the plan to move closer to the border with Europe in order to apply into an incubator with one of my projects. Talk with a few people. I think it’s better to have the whole control and make money from making your users happy. But yep, with cash I can do things fast, and burn it too :) From the previous failures, I learned how to play with finances.
I’m just not a sales person, this is why I think the product is important
I’m interested to know how do you plan to attract new users. What steps were made by now?
I have a dedicated place with links and drafts related to user acquisition. [Note](Some of that information was packed into article1, article2, article3)
I’m interested to know how do you plan to attract new users. What steps were made by now?
Only for dietary software I started like experienced people advice: from getting feedback. I made 140 contacts, chat with 70–80 people about my ideas, create a specification that you’ve read, received 5 form submissions, get one girl that interested to collaborate with me.
You can read questions that I asked nutritionists here
I must change my answer about the intern. My ideal intern has 10 years of experience in development. I hired a few guys that have a long story of coding and it was a pleasure to work together. it was not cheap, but I know that this team member will save my back.
So when I’ll have cash — I’ll hire guys that know how to code. because they know the philosophy of coding. coding is part of their DNA.
Current Update :)
I must change that opinion about an experienced people. Right now I split our project into some small chunks, I think it’s not necessary to get very experienced developers at this point of time. Later, when we’ll decide to rebuild our project from scratch again and use some latest and advanced tech — it might be necessary. But for now — I’m cool how it’s going.
Thank you for reading. Be safe. Clap/Like this article.
