tech-company, employees, startup-costs, hiring, teamI am working on starting an app development company. I am starting with one app and I’m planning on expanding later on. With a small budget, what are some of the first hires I should make other than a developer for the startup?
Your title uses a somewhat difficult term in business: “necessary.”
What positions are necessary to develop apps? There’s just one: a developer. Beyond that is icing on the cake. Now, some of that icing will be quite valuable and some of it, well, not so much. But it only takes one person to write a good app, if they have the necessary skills.
What I think the real goal to ask for here is “what are the best auxiliary positions to start off with?” And that’s where it starts to depend more on your particular circumstances. Namely, what skills do you and/or your developer not have that you need in the company?
I see a couple people have mentioned the absolute, dire need for a backend developer and a UI developer, and I have to disagree. Having two people with particular skills is great, and in an ideal world–arguably–that’s how it’d be, but I would never call it “necessary.” Well, not in all cases. I’ve known some awesome, well-rounded developers who had plenty of skill on either side of the user/backend divide. Developers don’t have to limit themselves to one or the other. I’ll cautiously say that the best front-end-only developer will always be better at front-end stuff than the best “well-rounded” one, but when we’re talking “with a small budget,” you’ll have to take a step back and establish whether you need the best, or just someone who will make a pretty product and not require a team.
That all said, I do have to concede that developers tend to work better in teams. That’s debatable, but as a currently-overworked developer, I’ll assure you that a team would be nice. So without encroaching on the grounds of a specialized case of https://startups.stackexchange.com/questions/354/is-it-better-for-a-tech-founder-to-be-highly-skilled-or-well-rounded, I’m tempted to say that your second hire (or first, again, if you are the developer) should be another developer to help balance the workload and allow for some experience-sharing on that front. You’ll want to, of course, try and find someone who fills the inverse-skill-set of your original one, speaking in terms of backend/front-end experience. If your current dev is 70% backend to ever 30% front, look for someone with the opposite experience. Obviously quantifying such subjectivity is meant only as example, but I hope you see my point. Everyone has their strong points, so be aware of what you have (and what you don’t) when you hire.
Beyond that, then, you just need to think, again, about what your particular business needs. Are you seriously tight on marketing skill? Maybe that should come before a second developer. Maybe you have the best tech mind in the business but you can’t talk to a client for the life of you, hiring someone in communications or marketing will probably do you well.
It’s all just relative. It depends on what you have and where you want to be. I would personally suggest sitting down with all of your employees (be that two, or only one of you), and making a list of what skills you feel you have, and what skills you don’t. Then you can use some commonsense to read through what positions might help you along, and hire people to fill those positions.
As myself owing such company, I can say that the most critical positions are a developer and a designer. This is bare minimum. Start with one of each. you will probably have to hire another developer soon if the current one cannot handle all the work.
Later on you will need project manager and sales person. For now, you should do these roles.
From the purely development point of view, a good ratio is :
A two person team could be Growth hacker-Programmer + UI Designer-UX, bug tester
Be careful not to underestimate the growth hacking part though, it takes a lot of time and energy and influences greatly your chances of success.
Roughly some of the necessary job positions in an app development company are:
Idea Stage (1 person):
Founder Stage (3+ people):
Seed Stage (5+ people):
Angel Stage (9+ people):
Series A (20+ people):
Series B (30+ people):
You need to fill all these roles individually:
Also keep in mind that there is no rule, every company is different, multiple roles can be filled by the same person if he is skilled enough.
This is just to give an idea of what you might need, not what you will need.
If you hire multiple developers on a lower part time basis, you have the benefit of risk spreading, so if one gets sick or cancels the contract, you are not left alone. You also have the benefit of comparing their performance and keeping the right ones after some evaluation time. Another point is that you can increase the workload if needed, which is impossible with one full time developer.
The question designer or no designer depends on who you want to make apps for. Internal business apps mostly care about functionality and workflow, while end customer apps have to look nice and feel good to be accepted.
Same applies for marketing, most end customers need to be convinced with shiny advertisement that your product is good, business usually contact you so you don’t need marketing but rather someone who knows your developers skills.
Also if you are not tech savvy, never try to estimate anything your developers have to do. The same sounding thing can easily vary in a factor of 10-20 because there is hidden complexity. Let them make the estimates to their best knowledge and then keep track of that and how long it really took to get a feeling how good they estimate and what to expect.
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