Over the past couple of weeks, we have been busying ourselves, attending event after event, looking for a lead developer to join Face Your Cause and after hours of networking, we have finally made a breakthrough!
Since beginning this new venture, Tom, Vish and I have been networking our balls off in order to get feedback on what we’re doing and more importantly, recruit a lead developer. During this ongoing process, I have met dozens of entrepreneurs and developers and despite wanting to initially avoid giving ourselves official positions, we realised that in order to network more effectively we had to bite the bullet and adopt some roles.
Coming from a technical background and having had some experience with starting an Internet company, I have comfortably fallen into the role of Chief Technology Officer. This means that when Tom and Vish get probed about the mechanics of how Face Your Cause will work, they can utter the magic words, “Let me introduce you to our CTO”, and with a puff of white smoke and a small bang I appear at their side, ready to indulge in some geek speak. However, my role as CTO is not just limited to spewing out technical jargon!
As a CTO, it helps if you actually know what you are talking about, and in my case, when trying to recruit developers I really needed to be on the ball when it came to talking about what we had planned from a technical point of view. I have to admit, to begin with, I didn’t have a clue about the technical side of Face Your Cause, because it hadn’t really been defined. To solve this problem, I took the opportunity during the networking events to discuss what we wanted to achieve with wiser entrepreneurs and techies, in order to pick up some hints and tips. My plan was to piece these little pearls of wisdom together and regurgitate them as convincingly as possible when confronted with a technical interrogation from a potential developer!
One thing I knew for sure was that you can’t blag when you are talking to a developer. Tom could probably blag his way into the Women’s Institute (though I’m not sure why) but his “powers of exaggeration” were no match for the experienced techies we talked to. So for my plan to work, I had to make sure I looked up any jargon I didn’t understand and took lots of notes. This method worked out pretty well and after a few networking events, I actually managed to piece together a pretty decent technical plan, but there was still one questions that I had difficulty answering: “If you have a technical background and you’re the CTO, why don’t you build the website?”
Having come up with a string of hopeless answers to excuse why I wasn’t going to build the website, this question really started playing on my mind. My main reason for not building the website was that I hadn’t had any web development experience. A secondary reason is that I didn’t want to get pigeon holed as just a developer on the team. Upon further consideration, these two excuses actually seemed pretty weak. Being a computer geek, I should be able to pick up at least the basics of building a website in Ruby on Rails pretty quickly, especially because Ruby is an Object Oriented Programming language and OOP was my favourite CompSci course. Also, as many people have pointed out, Ruby on Rails is pretty easy to get to grips with and there’s a great online and offline community to rely on. As for being pigeon holed, this is an absurd argument because as CTO, I have full control over the product design and both Tom and Vish value my experience in start ups. As the developer, I can actually put my ideas straight into action and I don’t have to rely on other peoples’ interpretations.
As you may have guessed then, the breakthrough is that for the time being at least, while we are in need of a prototype for Face Your Cause, I have decided to take on the development myself. This way we can actually start making some solid progress with our idea! The long term plan is that while I put together a prototype, Tom and Vish will develop the offline part of the business and keep hunting for some expert coders. With a working prototype and a development team, including myself, we can then pitch to angel investors in order to raise enough cash to launch Face Your Cause version 1.
As Richard Branson says: “Screw it, let’s do it!”
Side Note on getting developers:
These are the most frequently asked questions which I had to answer and if like us you are on the hunt for a developer; I strongly suggest that you prepare some responses:
1. What programming language do you plan to work in and why? We are working in Ruby on Rails because its quick produce working apps and the learning curve isn’t too steep for me!
2. Are you going to pay the developer(s) a salary or offer equity or both? With no cash at the moment, equity is our only option. I am a strong believer that having at least the lead developer on equity is essential because they then have a vested interest in the long term success of the company and therefore the product they are building will not just be a short term solution.
3. Would you consider outsourcing? For example, I met a lot of contractors who were offering cheap labour in Eastern Europe for development projects. One guy even said that he could get me a team of four developers, all for just £5 per hour!!!
4. How are you hosting the website? Amazon Web Services is becoming increasing popular and a number of people I have spoken to are testing it out or have already moved to AWS. I looked at EngineYard, as it was highly recommended for Rails hosting, but the prices they were quoting were way too expensive for us! Slicehost looks like a very attractive option for us at the moment.
Finally the most important question of all:
5. How is this going to make any money? Having some idea of an exit strategy is also essential if you are offering equity.
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