Startups Stack Exchange Archive

From being developer to startup

I am a developer with 10+ years of experience (fullstack/backend) and I feel like I have reached the point that I don’t want to work for anyone apart from myself (meant as company/product). However I totally lack of any sort of commercial/business experience and to be honest, I have not even an idea for a product. Any suggestion about how to get and develop an idea? Join to some hub/incubator?

Answer 12184

You need to come up with business directions. If you don’t have a business idea, you should:

Answer 12191

Amazing answers, but none seem to convince you. Isnt it?

I have been in startup for about two years and here is my take,

To build up a startup, you may start working at startup as a programmer and then you may push your self little harder to jump in the following way

Developer Lead Developer Tech Lead CTO CIO CEO or CoFounder or Director

I joined a start up as a lead, and then become CTO as I had management and programming skills. I started building my own team and thats how i have progressed. As of now, I left the startup to build my own. During the journey, I become

Better Developer Better Thinker, Innovator Better Leader Better Manager and also a businessman.

As you have mentioned that you haven’t known about business this process will actually help you. Or may be you will invent better.

This is completely personal view. And comments are welcomed.

If the company you choose to apply, does allow you to build yourself on the side, you may want to start your building start-up on the side.

Answer 12189

Sorry If I give you a very stupid answer. Developers with 10 Years experience could teach others to learn and improve their coding skills. I am a novice developer on Ruby on Rails, I can tell that I look after applications build by expert developers to help me learn new languages and solve the coding problems I have faster. Maybe you should use your experience to help others with some advanced WebApplication? In the end educational and developer tools are very remunerative, because developer stick long time in front of their laptop. I can tell you in my noob Programmer experience that very often my problems/doubts do not get answered on Online Discussion and I need a lot of Human Feedback that it is very hard to find.

Answer 12193

Consider making yourself available as a partner to the Sales/Marketing guy who has an idea and needs a tech guy to make it happen. In my experience there are a lot more of the Sales/Marketing guys walking around with ideas than there are Tech guys who can make it happen.

Take 49 or 51 percent and start the new company. Make sure the Sales/Marketing guy can get some customers and bootstrap as long as you can. Good luck!

Answer 12216

The most important thing in the beginning I’d say would be to find a co-founder or two and begin collaborating with others quickly.

Many potential partners are out there working on their own ideas already – so you offering to bring your development skills to help build their product might work out great for them. If you do this, I’d recommend working with them a while and really getting to know what their vision and work styles are before actually going into business together.

Answer 12217

This is really a very interesting question as well a milestone making question too.

I have been a startup for the past 2.5 years. And before, was a developer who takes projects from contacts and online, complete them and deliver.

In your case, the said ten years is really important. You might have learned a lot from those years. I believe with your experiance, you can pave the direction for multiple developers too.

Let me tell you something! That you will learn business only after starting to do business. So don’t be panic, regarding the business experience. But the experience that can be obtained from working at a good profile company is valuable.

If you believe that you have the desire and potential in you, go ahead and make your dream and believe this, start with minimum staffs only. You take business, route your developers. And think about increasing the staff’s count only when it is very necessary only.

So, think yourself and take the right turn.


All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.