Startup x-factor's: going from “meh” to “buckle; up, this is happening
You have an MVP product or something I like to call vaporware. You have some traction and are servicing an unmet need in a market/industry. The bulk of your time at this point is spent on doing sales or marketing, pitching to investors of all kinds, and trying to keep your company afloat as you reach the next summit in your startup journey.
If you are building a software product (SaaS etc.), you probably have either a small dev agency contracting for you, or maybe you have some jr devs that are looking for their first real job, or you might even have an extremely seasoned connection, but they aren't able to commit the number of hours you need them too. In all of the situations above, you have 2 major blockers. You aren't getting the output to make your dream product actually come to life, and you are strapped for cash and can't seem to attract what you need to make it to the next level.
So you do what any logical human with a dream would do; you look for investment to grow and scale your idea.
The problem is a chicken and egg situation, and more often than not, you choose the lesser of evils in front of you and work with what you have; a jr dev that cant build what you have been asking for, a contracting agency that doesn't fully understand what you are building, and or a super sr person that isn't about to give up their day job. Or a combination of all of them!!
Relatively quickly, you find out that the investment firms are telling you that need a CTO and a full-on product team in place to actually make your pitch deck something that is grounded in reality…. if you are lucky enough to be working with a solid investment firm that will give you term sheets.
DRATS!!’’ dam that chicken and egg!!
Over the last 15 years, I have built a great company to help early/min stage founders get past this hump and many others. You will see plenty of “hey look at us” sales and marketing material on Medium from us in the future… but today… this is an altruistic peek behind the curtains of what investors are looking to see… and what 40% of my role is the first 6 months in a funded startup as a CTO. It's not all code, servers, style sheets, and strategy meetings.
A big part of my role when coming into a startup as a CTO is setting up a structure of “operational excellence” for your company's technology and product department. This is something I like to call :
Coiling the spring of kinetic energy
I call it that because that's exactly what you have to do, you need to set up guard rails and processes that are repeatable, scalable, and structured so that you can springboard to the next summit of your company!! It's actually not rocket science…..and it looks something like this;
What you have built for your MVP isn’t software… it's vaporware, my guy; sorry to burst your bubble. Let’s fix that.
- What does your PDLC (product development lifecycle) look like? (Review: Here are some things we should do to fine-tune on it that process for better output)
- Don't have a PDLC (product development lifecycle)? Cool, no worries, here is 2 weeks of company training in 2-hour time blocks to get the lifecycle set up on agile sprints, points and velocity, reporting, planning/grooming sessions, weekly demos, and 2-week release cadence like clockwork.
- What is your SDLC (software development lifecycle) flows? (Review: Here are some things we should do to fine-tune that process for better output)
- Don't have a standard SDLC (software development lifecycle) process? YIKES… here are the things we need to get in place (ci/cd, code peer review, and protected code branches, database redundancy, and failover, package vulnerability protection, server monitoring (alerts, logs, CPU, etc.))
- Please show me your Roadmap (2 weeks => annual [anything inbetween]) and show me how that directly relates to your PDLC, SDLC and how they all directly relate to your companies KPI’s.
- Don't have company KPI’s and or they aren’t directly related to company cross-functional KPIs?… Cool, no worries, here is 3 weeks of 2-hour time blocks to get that setup (the reporting structure and cadence setup), and here are another 2 weeks of 2-hour time blocks to align your PDLC/SDLC to cross-functional KPI’s
and honestly, that's it... no joke.
Sure, all the other daily things need to happen on the execution level of the above (build the product and disrupt the market LOL)… but the above is the silver bullet to taking your company from “meh” to “buckle; up, this is happening!!!!” If things don't have predictability, cadence, and continuous monitoring/ refinement, they will never scale. Without “coiling the spring” to make sure they are in place, your organization will never reach the next summit.
Feel free to dive deeper on each link above to see what each looks like in practice, or reach out to us at arus.io directly; we would be happy to walk you through them IRL or on a Zoom.
