Startups Stack Exchange Archive

What Roles are Critical to Fill for a Data as a Service Startup?

posted by: user11794 on 2016-10-28
tagged: tech-company, business-plan, startup-costs
score: 1

I’m starting a data collection/Data as a Service company where we collect telemetry from hardware sensors and deliver it to clients.

Some clients will simply want to have the data forwarded to them. Others would like data storage and a user interface that provides analytics. I was considering Tableau for analytics and AWS for storage. Cost for these is not a huge issue, since the data we are providing comes with a very nice margin.

I’m putting together a 5-year plan, and I am running into trouble identifying the types and numbers of roles I will need. Aside from the administrative and C-level roles, what fundamental roles will I need to fill in order to go to market and scale up?

We currently have 5 founders with a lot of various experience that’s relevant and essential to what we do, but handling large data sets and providing analytics is not one of those talents. We will need to hire, and I’ve been trying to take a stab at it. Here’s what I’ve got:

Technical:

Database administrator (2?)
Network Admin (x1? x2?)
UX/UI designers. I don’t know much about this area, but I know I’ll want to offer an attractive user interface and give a good experience. Looking at the usual platforms: desktop PC/Mac, iOS and Android platforms. I’m not sure how many is reasonable (2? more?)
Web front/back-end engineers (2? more?)

Sales & Marketing:

Business Development (Sales) (2?)
Marketing (2?)

I imagine that these employees will hold multiple titles such as ‘Operations Manager’, so I didn’t include it as a separate item. If someone thinks that it should be a separate hire, please let me know. I understand that this might be extremely conservative, and we could have 60 people working for us in 5 years, but I need a template that I can use to start with. This will help me plug in the numbers for salaries that I can then project out at least a couple of years (taking into account growth and new hires).

Thanks

Answer 11467

posted by: Anonymous on 2016-10-30
score: 2

I agree with Jeremy Parsons’ comment. I read the following from your question:

you have money, and it is not a problem;
you have 5 people, who want to be C-level, but none of them seem to understand technology. Probably they were in marketing and in sales, but not in tech in the domain you start business in, thus you can not have prototype without involving someone else.

If you want to really run this business for such a long time, you will need one person who will be able to connect dots technically. This person, basing on information you provide him, and level of authority you charge him, will give you input into your plan. Then you will need to manage this person properly so that product and tech team evolve in the direction required by the business.

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