On starting without Technology
or how everyone tries to recruit me into being their CTO
Every week, I get these fantastic e-mails from someone new and full of passion.
They come through LinkedIn, F6S, Dreamstake or any other startup friendly service. Saying hey I need you on my team to build this awesome product. This platform will be great as long as you develop it with us or this mobile app is so revolutionary but your expertise is needed for it to start…
I know you are passionate about your new idea, but the first question I ask, or everyone asks, when seeing something new: What’s in it for me?
Well, the answer is always, you can have equity as CTO in this, this will be a thriving company surely to succeed in this year or the next. Just imagine building the next Instagram or Facebook. But as long as you are building it and we are giving you enough ideas and work, we will just sit around and wait for it to succeed. And we have this amazing team of other non-developers and non-designers who are so good at managing those “business” aspects. They will be needed for every decision of this app that gives you the current analytics on images of dogs with funny hats.
Every week, I tell you… at least 50 guys a year, sometimes girls… this is what I try to tell them.
Please validate your idea…
Ideas are meaningless. Ideas don’t exist in this world. Ideas can be turned into something greater but only if you make it so, other than that it’s just a though. If you can spread the thought and make people like your idea, it’s a start. It’s a great start.
Something on the lines of Seth Godin. People don’t need money to start with anything. People need to tell what they do, what makes them great to just enough people, and that’s how they get all the rest.
I think it’s because of this example that I am so requested, I really love to tell my story as a developer.
But nowadays, building a landing page is 0$, posting it through social networks is even less. Can you get enough people interested in your idea to make it worth developing?
Please validate your idea with money.
This is a hard note. Since people are still starting. The risk is about 90% against you, and asking for money is a hard job.
You know what some awesome guys say: Charge from day one.
An idea can only be valid if you can at least buy a beer to a friend from it. Yes users mean much, and also all those freemium options and a lot of other great free stuff you may tell to your users, but then you are saying, your time isn’t worth much.
Or you are saying that your product, your problem-solving app is not actually solving any problem, since they are not even investing in the solution.
Go to a supermarket and see what can solve your problems, every product there does some problem solving. I would suggest the toilet-paper, there is no freemium version, no trial, it’s worth every penny and you know, it helps you with a lot of shitty problems.
If you can’t build it, fake it.
Start with the Landing Page. Say it’s in a closed beta and try to automate tasks by e-mail, phone or any other service. Unless your startup is really very technical, and is about connecting one guy to a service, the e-mail is just so fantastic to do that.
Let’s say you are building the next freelance maid marketplace, get some maids first. 2 should do it, if they don’t have e-mails just grab their phones. Get some customers interested in booking a maid for cleaning. Let a form on your site do the reservation and just call the maids to see if it fits her schedule. No automation needed, just a phone call and you’re in business. Try to see how Ooomf, now called Crew, kickstarted this way into the first 5 figures.
Also on the faking it part. When something is launched, it gives you this feeling that it’s not perfect. And with every user you have on your site, you will see how unperfect for them it was. You will want to get better, every time, just improve from that, it’s like a Diderot Effect. You will build something new and abolish something old. Until every little aspect of your startup is shining, the only thing it never ends…
Make every screen of your app/platform, describe every interaction… and then outsource it.
Or at least talk to some guys who will not be bothered if they can make you one of those tiny screens as simple as possible. No big projects, no huge roadmaps, just a screen.
Crowdsource different functionalities separately so it wont appear as much of a work for one developer. As long as they stay in the same language, there are guys who will be able to glue it altogether.
If you have enough algorithms from one side and from the other to make your maid-matching service have a geolocation algorithm with all the possibilities. Approach a decent developer and say, I have this already, we’re not starting from zero, can you make it work?
It may look awful at first, gluing parts is always something that Dr.Frankenstein popularised. But it was “alive” so you could call it a step forward into the next phase of your startup.
Startups are about people, technology just helps…
When you are pitching. When you are getting investment. When you are looking for partners or even hiring a CTO. It’s not the technological stack that does that for you, your startup becomes your vision and not the stuff on the servers.
Startups are about people, startups are made by people, not even startups, everything is made by people. So please until we have AI and Google Conscience, try to be nice to those who are around you.
Startups fail all the time, closing the websites and the the doors to the office and die. But people don’t really fail like that, they can close the doors of the office. But on the human side they always find a way to rise up again and do something else. As someone cool has said markets come and go, true friends stay…
Keep that in mind next time you’re asking me for help, or your next CTO. but if you need any help, don’t hesitate I am still replying you as all of those other 49 guys. Maybe the next time with this article.
