Can’t find a CTO? Need to bootstrap your build? Can’t find developers?
Well here’s a quick rundown of what you need to know to bootstrap your operational delivery and costs as an early-stage startup software business.
Bootstrapping your biz is thankfully fairly realistic for anyone with even just a modest budget to spare these days. If you don’t understand technology at all then you don't need to be a “technologist” to make some basic procurement and management decisions but you should be prepared to learn enough to get by.
Most early-stage businesses don’t need a CTO what they actually need is a mini-project team with someone to manage it at a price they can afford. Programmers are programmers and often miss the skills of management, delivery, security, infrastructure knowledge, design, compliance, product consulting, biz dev knowledge the list goes on. A CTO role is one that covers EVERYTHING and finding these people is hard as it's a broad skillset with a technical background with requires some experience to execute well on. Hire the CTO when you have proved the product /market fit and need to scale. If you can find one before that well good for you.
So what do you do?
Before you engage developers
Have you made a paper prototype of your product? Have you tested this on possible customers? Have you been through several rounds on this? Really make sure you have done everything possible to validate your idea BEFORE you spend a ton of money on dev costs. Once you’re on a path with software development it's expensive to change often solutions have to be rewritten from scratch if they’re not appropriately scoped out or approached from the get-go.
Solutions like Invision let you create a prototype which people can tap on a mobile phone or laptop just like they would a web or mobile app this will save you $$$ on costly build mistakes.
Procuring outsourced services
This can be a good option for getting an accurate estimate, most businesses will not fix prices for you but by keeping a strict and detailed description of work to be performed and prototype out your screens even if you can’t afford a designer — and remember UX designers are not visual UI designers and may not lay out your screens anyway. Just by trying to visualise what you are trying to achieve you will help communicate it, vendors have seen every type of weird requirement description you can imagine. This will be normal for them. But if you want to control your costs you need to have enough detail and you need to limit your chances. This is not an “agile” way of working unless you have enough money to timebox the delivery but that can be hard for people who haven’t worked in technology before.
Benefits
By using a vendor you will also be able to get a consistent price on post-project delivery support. Once you have delivered the build who’s going to fix the bugs, respond to user queries make any updates you didn’t anticipate? Pay for the hosting of the services and how that's maintained when your data centre falls over? Vendors can manage all that for you. There is also something around transferring business risk to another party — how much money will you use when that web application falls over? What are the service level agreements that will enable you to get your service up and running again? What does your contract with the vendor cover?
People so often think about initial build costs but don’t think about the ongoing servicing and support costs which can really sting on a shoestring. In-housing this at this early stage is a massive overhead financially and also in terms of administration. Don’t underestimate the project and administrative overhead with this. It will hurt especially if you don’t have the competency or experience to easily handle it.
To read a quick guide to procurement you can read here:
Vendors can also help you exploit the free Cloud services you’re entitled to as an early-stage business. This will limit your costs and liabilities. For more information see below.
Hiring a freelancer
Only seriously do this if you have some technology management competency in your team. Most freelancers work on a time and materials basis costs can seriously stack up and much like getting your car fixed without being a car mechanic you will struggle to understand what they are building otherwise.
However a quick guide to finding freelancers: FYI they are mostly NOT hanging out on LinkedIn waiting for you to contact them. Also, freelancers who are very obviously advertised tend to earn big money for big corporations you can’t afford on a startup budget. So where to find these folks you can afford?
Well, places like Upwork, IThire, Fiverr you have to sift through gazillions of profiles but you can find talent at an affordable price. The other thing which is obvious is to use your network ask everyone you know and remember a freelancer who doesn't deliver will be more expensive than a pricer one that does. I would always look locally in Meetup groups and no one seems to understand how valuable this is but Tech Twitter is THE networking hub internationally for a lot of dev talent. Most programmers especially most young programmers sit within their own network bubbles, there are a gazillion Discord and Slack groups and if you’re not on one of these networks its a great place to look for specific talents. There are also a lot of professional groups to find engineers and startups on Facebook. Search groups, and post messages on there asking for recommendations and connections people will reach back.
If you need someone to advise on what technologies to use? Well make a list of the most common ones so you at least understand what they are, Google is your friend here. It is easy to do a search and find out what the best use of a framework like React is. See if you can get a couple of hours of consulting from a programmer, architect or consultant just to give you a steer. This will help you narrow down your search. Startup hubs will be able to point you to someone who can advise possibly for free.
People working in the following markets will be cheaper than in the US and central Europe. Ukraine, Latvia, Serbia, Poland, and Romania — they are still not “cheap” quality talent costs money but will be a lower price than your corporate consultants in your local market if you’re in the US or some parts of northern Europe. There is also very high levels of engineering competence in these markets.
Other parts of the world: India, the Philipines, Myanmar — finding good talent can be hit and miss but there is excellent engineering talent to be found and costs are more affordable.
Do your best to get recommendations, put messages out on social media make sure you start well before you are ready to get going and have some flexibility on your delivery times. Freelancers often have other gigs and may fit you around other work. Make sure you have a thought-through approach to ongoing support and service once they have finished the build.
Free Cloud Services
To build a web / mobile app or technology service you need somewhere to host it. All the big cloud providers offer a free service level for 12 months which anyone can use for small projects but for early-stage startups, they offer significant subsidies to help you get off the ground. Why do you get so much for free? Because these businesses are wildly profitable but also and mostly because once you start with them it's such an Olympic effort to change you will be stuck with them for a while.
So which Cloud provider should you choose and why?
What you need to consider. Do you have any requirements for tight integration with your customers? In cases where this is so, you may have to consider that the majority of your customers will be on let's say Microsoft and then you may need to consider Microsoft for your solution provider.
AWS has the biggest network and largest number of data centres and broad flexibility of products to enable services for your business this is important as with AWS you can park your data anywhere in the world to ensure your services are compliant. Many compliance regulations stipulate that you need to host the data in a geographic jurisdiction in order to be compliant this varies between countries in Europe, not just on the EU-wide level. Make sure you do your research here. AWS doesn't have all services available in all datacenters worldwide however the other providers have realistically less coverage and services available than AWS. So if AWS can’t do it, it's likely that Microsoft and Google can’t either.
The biggest consideration however is that AWS is cheaper broadly than Microsoft and Google for a startup software firm. Once the free credits run out the cost will hurt. Make sure you anticipate this. For an approach on how to scale and what to consider here read this:
https://medium.com/@gemmawhitehouse/scaling-your-start-up-be4b572299ce
Microsoft and Google stack their products and services for the corporate market and they are very effective at this, hence the customer base largely reflects that. If you are a corporation you can get a lot for “free’’ but the overall fees you’re paying are of course obscene.
Most of the credits below are dependent on startup funding — so keep that in mind and read the criteria carefully. For early-stage VC-funded businesses, they will qualify for the larger credit amounts.
To sign up for AWS for startups programme:
“AWS Activate Provider with up to $100,000 in AWS credits, up to $10,000 in AWS Business support credits, pre-built infrastructure templates, training, curated content, exclusive offers, and more.”
https://aws.amazon.com/activate/
You can get up to $150K of credits from Microsoft.
https://startups.microsoft.com/
Google matches AWS with credits
https://cloud.google.com/startup
Manage all your budget
Set a budget up front make sure you are flexible about your schedule, and make sure you review the hours spend on building each week so you understand how much money is spent and on what. Make a list of priorities the things you MUST deliver and the things which are nice to have but not critical. Make sure you do this with a mentor or something external to your business. Most often founders struggle to make choices about the value of particular features, and this costs of course time and money and may not be required for validation of the concept.
Don’t forget the ongoing support costs that should be part of your budget. What will it take to test your solution without building the entire proposition? Product development and testing is a whole other topic but make sure you’re thorough, realistic and have anonymised feedback that's not attached to you personally. Testing early saves a lot of money later on and refines your requirements before build.
In the end
The experience of building a business is complex — you should be looking to bootstrap, save money and limit your liabilities and risk from the get-go. Your ability to do this as a business owner may save your organisation on the rocky road to scale. The biggest challenge is to be able to pragmatically solve things when they go wrong. Ensuring you have enough runway to do this is key to that journey. Don’t splash out on big salaries and expensive contracts before you really have to or need to. Spending too much at an early stage and spending big whilst scaling can kill your startup. Leadership with good cash flow management and product-centric sales capabilities generally win.
If you need more advice from recommended contractors, and vendors on how to get going with your first software build you’re welcome to reach out to me.
Otherwise, I wish you good luck. 🍀
