Where to find Investor and Full stack developer
In this regular feature, I tell you about the inspiring people that I had lunch with this week. From these people, I learned some useful tips on how to get computers to reach your goals for you!
-Jimmy, CEO of Lunchback
People say there are two types of people everyone is looking in the startup community: investors and full stack developers. They also say they’re hard to find. I disagree — I found one of each, on Lunchback.
Jacob Rudbäck — how to raise funding like a pro
I was anxious to meet Jacob, since he is offering tips on how to raise funding. That’s one of the challenges that Lunchback is facing right now (me and everyone else, right?) Jacob used to work at BCG, a top consulting firm, so I trust his expertise. He’s also an entrepreneur, and a practical, results-oriented person.
A while ago, Jacog had an idea. Being practical and results-oriented, he gave himself four months to raise the funding based on the idea. He decided that if he failed to raise any funding, it showed that either the idea or he wasn’t as good as he thought, and he would go back to the job. The end of the story: he raised 7 million SEK, with just an idea. So of course I wanted his tips, and I’m sharing them here with you:
- Looking for investment is an art, not an science. Try to be smart about how you look and whom you talk to, but ultimately just keep looking and don’t settle.
- Build a strong team. A strong team is even more important than a great idea.
- Be very specific on the plan, and lay out the strategy to the investor. The investor wants to know that you can come up with a business, not just an idea.
- Define milestones, and know exactly how the money is going to get you there.
After lunch, we visited his office and I got to meet the team. He’s right — the team is great.
Tang — how to find a full stack developer
Tang has an interesting app, ranked highly in Google App Store, that he created as a hobby project. His app has 20 000 users and 50% of them are daily active users. The metrics are astonishing, so I decided to meet Tang over a lunch.
Tang is a software developer himself, and he has worked in both big companies and startups. His last startup was a success initially, but it failed recently and he Shared the Lessons learned .
Here are his tips on finding good developers:
- Be friends with at least one of them, then they will introduce you to many more.
- A really good developer does it for the passion, not the money. Developers are in demand, so they can often get a good job. You have to get them passionate about your project, and the interesting problems they could solve.
We also have a great discussion about what makes startups fail from the technical side. He has extensive knowledge on how to avoid technical debt, which I found very interesting. He also had strong feelings about the importance of building culture from the earliest stages.
