Hiring a Development Team V/S Having a Techie Co-Founder

The current market scenario has gone through a great of deal of upheavals to back up the power of smart marketing, to a great extent. The environment is thrilling for entrepreneurs to survive and thrive with nerve-wracking challenges and rewarding outcomes. For most of the today’s startups, an app is the most critical part of your journey. Until and unless you know how to design and build one, the entire project can cost a lot to have it done professionally: between $100,000 and $500,000. And this gives rise to a situation where owners feel the disadvantage of not having a techie co-founder at their outset.

And usually, what they do is find a skilled engineer or a developer and have that person join as a co-founder/ CTO. At TatvaSoft UK, we would highly recommend choosing a person who has been a core part of the original founding team itself. Why not a technical co-founder or CTO, you may ask?

Founders must be experienced together- Building a startup is hard work and you need to embrace both good times as well as the bad ones. There will be victories but the probability of facing plenty of challenges is high. Trying to move on a journey with a person you don’t know that well would be more like marrying someone you have just met.

Instead, choose someone who has some established rapport or working history with your team members. After all, he not only knows what they’re capable of but what their demeanor is and how they respond to adversity.

Vetting Technical Skills Properly- The sole purpose of bringing a technical co-founder is to add skills in your team especially the ones they are lacking behind. And vetting someone without the right background for a position as important as a co-founder or CTO can be extremely disastrous. In such situation, all you can think of is bringing non-leadership developers or engineers. Even if you hire incorrectly, the mistake won’t be as difficult to fix.

Compensation and Equity for CTOs are Costly- Until and unless you have raised a significant round, the cost of bringing on a CTO could be pretty expensive in terms of both, or their actual compensation and also in terms of equity. We firmly believe in the fact that co-founders aren’t a hired gun, they are the ones who come up with an idea together also have a more ideological commitment to their startup.

Choosing the Right Tech Partner- Because Every General Needs an Army

These days, finding a technical co-founder seems to be the equivalent to finding the Holy Grail. I mean each and every entrepreneur is ready to claim that he or she could be the next million-venture startup if only they have a techie co-founder. The following post emphasizes on what are the things that a development team can offer that a technical co-founder can’t.

• Specialized services- One of the most compelling reasons to hire a prominent Software application development company. Imagine you aim to build a specialized piece of software for your business. This calls for experienced, skilled, knowledgeable professionals with profound industry insights. Though, as an individual, they might be extremely rare to come by, but as a team finding them is a much easier task.
• Ability to scale the team- Developing a software is a team effort, but there are times when you don’t require the entire team to work on the same project. I mean designers may only be required during the prototyping stage and involved in transitioning to the developers. In the first few months, you can avoid hiring developers and DevOps will probably only need to step in towards the beta release.
  Basically, software development teams are well equipped to scale up and down according to the planned work. Also, they make sure that any kind of work doesn’t fall on you- so that’s one less thing to worry about.
• Successful track record as a team- What is it that makes a great team? One that has been working for an extended period of time or one that is just getting past the introductions and still trying to remember each other’s name? The most important element that is impossible to replicate with new teams is a successful track record. Getting the rhythm can take months or years to achieve.
  It may quite interest you to know that established companies have this teamwork structure down pat whereas new ones have to start from the beginning and spend time in creating the perfect work environment.
• Hitting the ground running- This is the perfect to seize opportunities and get your project off the ground sooner. Being a part of a highly ambitious timeframe, you must realize that you are losing on design and development and more importantly market opportunities. Instead, you can spend on prototyping your app and gaining early user feedback.
• The software-development process- Another overriding benefit of choosing a full-service technology-partner is the ability to plan and execute the entire software development procedure. Which is the backbone of any project. And don’t think for a second that going out and finding a technical co-founder will give you outstanding results. It takes time for everyone to work in sync.

Guest article written by: Nishtha Singh works as a PreSales manager at TatvaSoft UK – Software Application Development Company. She also relishes writing about various buzzing technology trends such as SharePoint, BizTalk, Java,.Net, Salesforce, mobile apps development and so forth. She simply aims to spread her knowledge of the latest technologies through her online contribution.