tech-company, startup-costs, business-model, lean-startupI am a sole founder of a mobile/web app Fintech business. I intend to outsource the design and development of the software in the initial phase. I expect that the outsourced tech company will provide additional support in the first 3 months after launching the product. For me, this removes the need to immediately hire a CTO, but instead focus on gaining traction in the early phase and then proceed to hire one or two developers. The question i don’t have an answer to is this: If my product was to launch tomorrow, what are the core hires i need to function properly and gain some traction assuming that the tech support is being initially outsourced?
I don’t think you can answer this question without a product. For instance, assuming that your app is perfect (and has few features, which is not a bad thing), and that tech support is handled, you can probably do it all yourself until you get way too many users. Some questions to ask: how many users do I expect to have? How do I intend to market my app? How will I administer sales/ad revenue? Is what I’m doing legal, and how can I make sure it stays that way? What infrastructure do I need to get this done? How will I support my users (ie: customer support and tech support).
If the answers to questions like these are all well known and you have a plan for how to do them, you’re set and won’t need anyone for a little while. Once the job becomes way too much to handle (well, preferably before that if you’re pro-active enough), hire someone to “do the things you procrastinate on”.
On the other hand, if you are looking at this list and have no idea on some of them, or you think it would be way too much to work to do it all, hire enough people so that the amount of work you are capable of/competent in doing gets done. If you have no money for a lot of hires, I’d recommend learning how to do as many of those jobs as you can before finally finding the ones you can’t do on your own, and focus your hiring there.
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