Hiring a Developer or Co-Founder CTO for Your MVP

Congratulations!

You may have raised some early seed capital (or considering sweat equity rather than seed capital) to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and now thinking you need to hire your first team member or possible CTO as co-founder.

Building your own team to get your startup going is exciting, right? Or maybe even a little nerve-racking? How will you find the right person without incurring recruitment fees?

Ever wondered why 90% of tech founders fail within the first two years?

Try googling "startup hiring a CTO" (perhaps you already have?). You will find a rather large number of stories questioning whether this is even the right decision for a startup. There is good reason for this, believe it or not. It is one of the major contributing factors why tech startups fail. Yeah, I know, that seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?

Chances are that you are a founder without deep tech knowledge or experience to build an MVP. But what you will have is a highly developed idea of what you want and what problem your product is solving in the world, perhaps born of some kind of personal "lived experience". You may even be one of the rare tech founders who have deep tech experience too, albeit this is less common.

The Non-Code MVP: The Step Most Founders Skip

Hopefully, you have already developed a "non-code MVP" and tested it robustly in your chosen market for commercial viability before writing any code to build your MVP. In this blog, I will presume you have already market tested your proposed product and commercialisation strategy. I am being optimistic, sadly, as most founders miss this crucial step with a non-code MVP, or worse, it was not performed objectively with a critical eye, leading to a misguided and overly optimistic view that they are onto something great.

It is perhaps one of the first big mistakes that founders make: not objectively completing what I prefer to call "tell me why I am wrong" using a non-code MVP as your tool. And what do I mean by objectively? "Looking for the reasons it won't work vs looking for the confirming evidence for why you think it will."

Presuming you have robustly tested and validated your MVP design with a sample of users from your selected market (preferably a good number of end users and not just two or three), including your commercialisation strategy (i.e., how you will make money), once done you are now ready to build your MVP.

How Do You Know If Your MVP Testing Results Are Successful?

It is important to set the bar right for what is a "good MVP". If your product is successful, its object must be to truly excite your users/customers. To "wow them". If it doesn't, it is likely to be a long, hard road ahead! It will feel like you are rolling a snowball uphill rather than watching it roll itself downhill, getting bigger and bigger as it gains momentum.

The decisions you make now are so critical that they will haunt you for years if you get them wrong. I know it sounds dramatic, but sadly it is very true.

Why the Vast Majority of MVPs Fail

Not scalable, poor security compliance, poor selection of underlying platforms, delivering poor user experience, not being well aligned to how the product is to be monetised, failure to comply with privacy laws! That means the $200-300k or more that has been invested in building an MVP is inevitably trashed (or should be), and perhaps worse, attempts are made to fix it, which is like throwing more good money after bad.

"Why isn't the industry fixing this?" Because it is the status quo. It is just how it is and has always been. But it doesn't need to be.

What Is the Underlying Cause?

The 21 biggest challenges founders face that are not being appropriately addressed. If you knew the risks in advance, wouldn't you take mitigating measures to minimise the impact of these if you could?

To achieve early successful execution in building a first-class MVP requires access to a broad range of skills, the right platforms, architecture and a team that know how to work efficiently together. To do this properly, a founder needs to be able to access people with at least 5-10 years of experience across the following areas:

• User & market research expert(s)
• Product Manager
• Scrum Master
• UX designer
• UI designer
• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• Solution Architect
• Database Administrator (DBA)
• Business Analyst
• QA/tester
• Customer support expert
• Payment gateway expert
• Website/mobile app analytics expert
• PPC (paid advertising) expert
• SEO expert
• Integration specialists for 3rd party systems

What Critical Platform Choices Need to Be Made?

There are a surprising number of platform decisions that need to be made from the outset. Choosing badly will set you back later.

• What 'stack' will your product be written in?
• Code platform (GitHub, Bootstrap, etc.)
• IT Backup and Security system
• Project management tool
• Prototyping tool
• Test case management tool
• Hosting service provider platform and infrastructure architecture
• Collaboration tools (Teams, Slack, Google Docs, etc.)
• CRM system
• Customer support service system
• Inbound telephone call management system
• Outbound call monitoring and recording
• Web and mobile app analytics tools
• Email platform
• Marketing platform(s)
• Google Search Console
• Social media handles
• Survey platform

Critical Metrics: Success Measures That Guide You

In addition to all of the above, you also must have a clear handle on what performance metrics you should be monitoring that let you know if your business model is working. These will be closely aligned with your commercialisation strategy.

• CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
• Customer Churn
• Monthly Website Traffic
• Monthly Mobile App downloads
• Website/App engagement stats
• Lead stats

You will want to have implemented the systems to measure all of these stats from day one. Without clear insight into performance analytics, it is akin to flying a plane without instruments!

A Tech Founder's Confession

Take my own experiences for example. I was 50 when I started my second startup and was one of the first in a small team in another startup before that, working with people that I had already worked with for six years in a company prior to that one. I had 30 years of IT and management and technical experience.

I co-founded my previous company in 2011, which I led as CEO for 11 years, including listing it on the ASX. You would think that experience should have underwritten success, right?

But despite my experience, the CTO I hired, whom I had known for years and who was previously with a major market-leading online media company, and another seasoned executive resulted in us making a lot of wrong decisions in the early years. The result was we burned through more capital than we should have, took longer to get products to market than we should have, and had to re-write our app more than once!

Over time I ended up building a first-class high-performing team and built a platform that services thousands of loyal healthcare businesses (customers) across a broad range of professions in Australia and New Zealand. We completed four acquisitions and enabled millions of Australians to engage through our platforms taking over 18 million online appointments. Customers and users loved it.

I wished I had access to Dreamoro Services when I launched that business!

It is not an unusual journey for a founder, but it does not have to be that way! That is why I founded Dreamoro, to bring to tech founders a broad set of proven skills from a high-performing team that has been working together for years.

Bottom Line

Effective utilisation of Pre-SEED, SEED, and Series A Capital, a quicker time to market with early results that have been demonstrated, and better sleep knowing you are working with a partner who shares your passions and your ambition for success while assisting you in avoiding the numerous mistakes you could otherwise make along the road.