As a CTO i’ve noticed a couple of things in your post, which don’t sound good to me at all. I’ll try to explain them.
You’re complaining about being a female and POC, but being a POC myself. This has never stopped me from anything. On YC people only care about things like marketable skills, idea (no idea is preferred), connections, knowledge of industry, experience building businesses.
A CTO does way more than just “build” the product. One of the red flags you’ve shown is that you are planning how long it will take. We as CTOs will tell YOU how long it will take as we have the experience building things like that.
Looking at your idea it sounds like you are building some sort of social network and your business model is ads. Which means that the actual product is the people on your platform. Building a social network is one of the hardest if not the hardest thing to build. It will take a LOOONG time before you will see any profits from an idea like that.
Personal rule i’ve made for myself, I won’t build anything if there’s no potential customers. I want to see a need in the market and there should already be people that want to use my product and are even willing to pay for it regardless if it exists or not. I will find these people myself or talk to people to see what they actually need in order to validate the idea. As a matter of fact i’ve seen people get funding with just a validated idea and without a single line of code written.
As a sidenote for you, it might be good to get some experience building tech products or learning how they are build first. The reason i’m saying this is that it’s also an important skill to reasonably estimate how long it will take to build something. If you’re going to be hiring contractors you are going to be screwed/disappointed with the results, because you have no idea how long something should take.
Please take this as advice on how potential CTOs might view your idea. It’s not meant to break you down.
As a CTO i’ve noticed a couple of things in your post, which don’t sound good to me at all. I’ll try to explain them.
You’re complaining about being a female and POC, but being a POC myself. This has never stopped me from anything. On YC people only care about things like marketable skills, idea (no idea is preferred), connections, knowledge of industry, experience building businesses.
A CTO does way more than just “build” the product. One of the red flags you’ve shown is that you are planning how long it will take. We as CTOs will tell YOU how long it will take as we have the experience building things like that.
Looking at your idea it sounds like you are building some sort of social network and your business model is ads. Which means that the actual product is the people on your platform. Building a social network is one of the hardest if not the hardest thing to build. It will take a LOOONG time before you will see any profits from an idea like that.
Personal rule i’ve made for myself, I won’t build anything if there’s no potential customers. I want to see a need in the market and there should already be people that want to use my product and are even willing to pay for it regardless if it exists or not. I will find these people myself or talk to people to see what they actually need in order to validate the idea. As a matter of fact i’ve seen people get funding with just a validated idea and without a single line of code written.
As a sidenote for you, it might be good to get some experience building tech products or learning how they are build first. The reason i’m saying this is that it’s also an important skill to reasonably estimate how long it will take to build something. If you’re going to be hiring contractors you are going to be screwed/disappointed with the results, because you have no idea how long something should take.
Please take this as advice on how potential CTOs might view your idea. It’s not meant to break you down.