I am wondering what others think… some podcast says “to want a cofounder so that you get a free software engineer is the wrong motivation”. Ideally I would want funds to hire a senior developer to help with prototyping a solution. An alternative would be to hire a cofounder to do that… as a “free software engineer”, which would actually be extremely expensive in terms of equity.

What do others think? Can a full time senior developer start and lead the development of an MVP?

  • SaltMaker23@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    While many try to approach it with the mindset of holding tight to your shares, for most people that will just jeopardize their chances of success.

    “33% of something big is better than 100% of nothing”

    A technical project won’t get very far if you don’t have expertise internally that would mean long term full time employees or a technical founder from day 1.

    “It’s quite hard to start a shoe repair business if you can’t repair shoes yourself”.

    While building a tech product requires many skillsets, the main one required for an MVP being: Viable and Product.

    1. Viable: You’ll need someone that can generate large amount of money without a product.
    2. Minimum Product: You’ll need someone that can create a minimum product without much money

    These two constraints are why a technical cofounder is almost a requirement otherwise costs for your product will quickly skyrocket way beyond reason and way before you have any kind of revenues.

    Given your question: you don’t have 1M$+ to start your company with VC friends that’ll pour in 5M$ in a year or two. You won’t be able to “buy” your way into a product, you have nowhere near enough money.

    Our M[V]P (without the viable part) building took 12 months with 2 full time dev as founders. In our jobs we left (the 3 of us) were paid 12k€ (dev) 10k€ (dev) and 10k€ (biz) monthly.

    if you were to pay 20k€ montly to have an MVP in about a year it would mean you are a PO of some kind. But it would still mean 250k€ for your MVP if you are an experienced PO. Myself as a senior dev, if I were to hire people it’d have been at least 1M€.

    Startups need time in order to become successful, to find customers, get feedback, find partnerships until finally you become profitable. A 10k€/month burden might cripple your chances of success if you start small, you’ll have to start BIG.