My startup progress that will buy me a Ferrari

[AppMan]

Sounds like you're micromanaging, they are probably disengaging because of it. That or they dont know what they're doing. Only two explanations that would make sense really.

No micromanagement, weekly or biweekly deadline tasks is normal in software development companies, if you cant show any progress after week of coding you might have a problem.
it could be they don't know what they are doing, but like I said the tasks I give to them usually are easy to medium in difficulty. I leave architecture and hard parts to myself since I know to such task I need far more experienced and expensive developers.

I also have another theory, I think many freelancers are not looking for serious projects even if it is pay them , they mostly look for simple modifications or small size projects that doesn't require from them to understand all the picture, they simply dont want to invest in these projects as for them it is not worth since it is temp job.

 

[AppMan]

After a week from now, I ll have a junior software developer joining my company, this is the first official hiring I am doing for a local person , the government will be his salary and I have to pay the rest of expenses , in return he will gain experience and get trained with me to built his skills .
He is computer engineer , but not the bright type, he is learning from scratch , but promised he is going to get up to speed and he is already learning now.
The reason I hired :
1- I like the idea that my business have employees (even though it is a fake event in term of real success )
2- his salaries are paid by government for 3 months.
3- I am tired from overseas freelancers who are not serious about the work.
4- I ll gain experience managing and leading other people , which I didnt have it in the official way I ll have it.

Lets see how this experience will be

 

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[AppMan]

So this week I hired a new developer, seem really know what he is doing, I am paying him double of what I usually pay for others , but that is to buy some time to finish my project, I want my MVP to be ready soon , so I decided to pay him what he want as long as I am getting more into making my MVP ready.
He delivered his first code , looks clean , however he changed some stuff without consulting with me and that could trigger more work to me , so I asked him to correct them .
Regarding my scripted life, I have moved to a new software company that less micro manage their employees, they are happy to have me since I have a lot of technical and business skills, also I dont feel so exhausted at the end of work day, unlike my previous job when it was sucking all my focus and energy.
So two things now changes :
1- My budget for developers increased in order to speed up building the MVP
2- I have more energy after my day job to work on this project .

Risks :
Paying developers this rate might not be sustainable.

 

[AppMan]

Tomorrow I have meeting with outsourcing company to provide me with a full time developer. although I have currently 3 developers but they are not putting enough hours to move in the speed I was wishing . one of the problem with full time developers is that they waste a lot of time. but I decided to give it 2 weeks trial to see how things will go.

Grants, I keep hearing about grants but so far I couldn't get one, the grant now needed to fund the hires, and I need some hires at this moment.

 

[OleksiyRybakov]

The way I assigned the tasks is by having a meeting and I describe all the details besides that I tonight some of the requirements if they are complex and show them some examples of how it should look like, most of the developers are intermediate developer and they need some guidance also they need some technical help for example yesterday one of the developers put one of the user interfaces in type script and it was slow but he couldn't know why it is a slow until I checked the code and I found his excessively using moment.js , I don't think what you are describing work here because they are developing something that doesn't exist they are not only maintaining the product like many developers work instead they have to build every interface from the ground up. And this is one of the problem I have until the developer start having good understanding of the product and it's ins and outs they leave.
I tried some high experience developers as a freelancers but they were worse than the others because they come to freelancing in hoping they can do a lot of work a short time because of their high experience but usually the work they delivered it's not as per the requirement because they don't spend enough time to analyze and think instead they just quickly get the idea and they try to implement it and usually such a good work is not a production work so I prefer less experience developers because they are more humble and they listen carefully to the requirement and take the project more seriously.

My approach worked twice for developing apps from scratch. To be honest, I'd rather develop apps from scratch than maintaining bad-designed code. Creating an entire framework like OpenCV is indeed complex though.

But I am not here to judge your way of work. Instead, since you have mentioned Typescript, do you mind me taking a look into the code and the requirements of your project? Since I'd like to switch to freelance after December I'd love to see what real-world projects look like in freelance.

 

[AppMan]

Product get expanded to have more important features , however that delayed its release to the market. from this week, from this week , the focus will be on releasing the product to the market. Financial wise , my contractor job provide me good financial resources to keep hiring people, on the other hand , it is more hard than employment and I feel more tired at the end of day than I was feeling when I was employee, there is a reason they hire contractor , to drop all their shit software on someone. However if I stayed in this contract for 1 year , most likely I can afford to not work for 2 months , so hopefully this will payoff at the end .
the students team doing well , but not impressed by what they are doing , the only reason I am with them is they are doing my marketing website for free, however most likely I will need to hire someone after them to sharpen the website.
Lesson learned :
Dont expect sudents to produce professional results, and if you are not loosing money you might be loosing time.
Think well in your product and its features, I had to redo many of its part and thus increase my spending .
Dont be shy to go to the market with your product, as long as it offer the basic functionality you want.
#1 product require #1 team
When people who report to you are angry don't take it personally , they might be frustrated from something.

 

[AppMan]

Today was a bad day for my Startup , the front end development team wasted many paid days with nothing, this is after I paid one month in full for this software company , as I used to pay them every 15 day, but they kept asking to pay every month since they already delivered a lot of good work so I agreed, I have another meeting with them but it seem this month will not be a easy month with them.

During our testing for first release to public , I found one of my back end developers implements some stuff wrong , and he didn't even tell me , now I have to rework some parts that I thought it is already done , luckly it is backend so I can do it without hiring another developer, but himself resigned as he didn't like to take responsibility of his wrong work or why he didn't test it as he said and confirmed to me .

However I know this is a moment of truth and many issues will arise until we have the release go to public. I hope I could take one month off and dedicate myself to this start-up to fix and lead , but I have to work to pay my bills.

 

[AppMan]

Clean up time:
1- Got rid of Software agency after their failure to deliver quality code.
2- Got rid of students group and revoked all their permissions, after they proved they are a waste of time.
3- Kept only the best Backend developer.
4- Got rid of angular developer who was delivering buggy code.
5- Hired a new angular developer that know what she is doing and in very good hourly rate .

From :
3 developers + 1 group of students + 1 QA
now :
2 developers ( one backend(part time PM) and one front end ) only

Things learned :

• The more you hire people the more time you need to manage them.
• Be careful in hiring, bad hires are waste of time and money and big delay.
• Track their progress, it is easy to think they are doing something while they are not.
• They dont have same of your passion and they can leave without looking back.

Alpha release has failed on Feb/28, now reevaluating and setting new target based on available resources .

 

[AppMan]

My app now is more stable, have currently 2 developers and 1 QA , things are moving slowly but steadily, this app will be a middle man between customer and business, which is the best model to scale and make healthy profit. my Full time job is back busy so I no longer able to give a lot of to my SaaS unless it is weekend.
I am trying to find a way to leave my full time job to focus on my app , I am thinking in getting some funding with many post covid programs available, as I am more believing to convert this SaaS to business I need to dedicate it more serious time and take some risk.

 

[AppMan]

Yesterday I met a coworker with me who also started his own SaaS business , but unlike me , he left his day job and spend 2 years building the software, what I found he was good is he faked how perfect is his software , as he is advertising it as a cloud solution while after talking with him it turned out it is not, he also claims that he has many paying customers , yet it doesn't seem his software is production ready. over all he created good marketing materials that display him as a real SaaS startup with a lot of success.
I felt a little jealous because his software is ready while mine still not, however I understand he is in different stage in life when he can afford to leave his day job.
Also I dont think if it is fake app he will go too far, he might fake it in the early stage to report him self as a startup owner, but over the time only real deals stays.
All that gave me another boost that I needed to push my self to work on my SaaS. I am currently designing the website and preparing a list of businesses to contact, also I have subscribed to linkedin learning to learn more about sales as I never did pure sales activity before. I am excited to do the sales calls as sales career is tough one and this will widen my personal skills to more new skills

 

[AppMan]

One backend and two front-end developers, the development is on tack, also I am back to my full-time contract job. at times feel overwhelmed, but happy that no crappy developer is there.
The inflation rate in Canada just going crazy, although the government keeps saying it is only 6%, the reality is different, I am thinking of renegotiating my contract at the end of this year, as I feel the spending in this way is not sustainable.
I promised my self to start learning cold calling, so far I didn't do it, but planning this week to take that phone and call this.

 

[AppMan]

So the two and half months ended, this was the longest off time from full-time job I take in 12 years, and here is what I found :
1- You need that time to build your business, employment takes the best of you during the day.
2- Having time without an idea is also useless.
3- Full-time job is not that bad in the end, you get paid for what you like to do and know how to do it, as long as financially rewarding, there is not a lot to miss outside especially if you are not a people person.
4- some benefits of owning a business can be obtained by faking it; nobody will read your accounting records to verify what you say is really what it is.
5- After two and half months of hard work, I feel I am now off and that the pressure is now less on me. I kind of appreciate having a full-time job, finding customers is too much stressful job.
6- My friend who I mentioned before who started a business from scratch is now doing very well, he is talking about doing big stuff and making big purchases, which means he really doing good money, however, he doesn't seem happy in his life, and working his a$$ off.

I felt I got matured a couple of years in this off time, and my view of many things has changed.
Back to my software, well I hired a new guy who charges more but produces better results, however, his last PR was full of bugs, and seem losing his edge.

 

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[AppMan]

I read your thread with great interest and please don't take any offense to what I am about to say, but it seems that you are not going anywhere with this business.

As far as I can tell, you still don't have a single user and your app/website is still not out to the public. My question is what are you waiting for?

I agree with that the progress of building software is slow, in fact I halted all the dev activities because I found I have no enough time to make meaningful progress.

Then two things pushed be back to the project again
1- COVID19 which let me work from home and be able to have another personal PC beside my work PC.
2- Working as Contractor which give me enough financial power to fund hiring other developers as for me I don't have time and energy after 8 hours of day job to do any programming.
However I still have things that slow me down
1- my full time job (Contract)
2- the nature of freelancers, they get motivated at first then flake once they found another client or think they will get paid for do nothing.
3- having a young family is also take big chunk of my time
4- Studying to get my MBA.


Why I don't have alpha or beta version already open for public ? well without some features that I am going to release , you really don't have anything that other competitors going to offer.
Imagine you release something similar to MailCheat(Chimp) but more buggy and basic , and without any feature that MailCheat(Chimp) doesn't have. Who is in the right mind to use such app.
The only way to speed it up is by partnering with someone else, but so far I don't like the idea of having a partner, as I want to be free at least with this project.
However I decided any future project I will look for partner from start. And this is my advise to anyone cant dedicate to their startup to seek partner who have abundance of time.

 

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