CTO-as-a-service for non-tech founders
CTO-as-service for non-tech founders, finding a cofounder is hard, especially technical cofounders, take too much networking, also non-tech founders working spending unnecessary money with freelancers not know the whole software development cycle. What if provide a CTO-as-service for non-tech founders on a few areas on demand?
A friend of a friend did this before:
hiddenfounders.com
They moved on since then, you could get a lot of ideas from their experience.
Thanks for sharing this @omneity!
You're welcome @kilghar! You might be interested in the discussion going on in the sibling thread.
Any idea why they decided to move on?
They found a more juicy niche :D
CTO as a service is a subset of staffing in general, and if you target high demand areas which require expensive skills, you can make a lot of money. But you need to be well connected as well.
I see, thanks for sharing - I think it gives a lot of clarity on how CTO-as-a-service could work as a business. Scalability wise could be something worth considering.
It reminds me of these guys called Red Antler. In the very same light, I guess you could call them CMO-as-a-service, they are huge and work very similarly like your friends in respect of staffing and sorta a pre-accelerator.
It might seem tempting to get into it but it requires a very different kind of person to what I would consider the stereotypical startup founder.
Even if it looks fancy because of the branding, just like uber, it's actually a very low tech startup in the sense that it doesn't leverage technology as a multiplier. It doesn't have a product and thus it cannot scale without recruiting more people.
It also requires much more soft skills in the sense of pristine project management, the ability to shift between projects as well as making sure all involved people are on track. Tech plays a little role in this.
All to say, it's not a bad thing, but if you don't have a PM or service background (freelancer / agency), this business is not what you think it is and you might want to think twice.
UNLESS your product is some sort of framework or technological stack, and you're hand picking your customers to fit your product narrative, in which case the staffing-as-a-service part becomes accessory and turns into regular customer success and sales engineering as your product grows, becomes self-service and the service part becomes a premium package for the highest paying customers (enterprise).
Really good comment especially about how little role plays here. This counterintuitive because if you are successful with this, you would end up with a team of experienced developers who do use tech daily.
The issues is as @omneity has said that you can't multiply this by tech much. In order to scale you have to hire more people . Plus I think problem with consulting early stage companies is money, they often lack this so cashflow might be a problem, they fail often so you could end up chasing customer after customer instead of having long term projects bringing in stead cashflow.
@omneity I am curious if this was why your friends at hidden founders moved to bigger companies / projects.
Could also be coming from strategic stand point if it is industry focus and backed by industry players who want to build fast in tech. Anyway it's a good chat, but I guess we all stray too far away from the OP's posting haha. Cheers and Happy New Year :)
Billiant Idea. As a Non Tech Founder, i would love to use an On Demand CTO service for guidance, development, mentoring & also exploring future potential partnerships. However, very critical and sensitive to convince that a person's IP and idea is protected.
Hello! If you're having trouble hiring a CTO, the three most common options for hiring a CTO are to work with a freelancer, hire an in-house specialist, or find a trusted specialist in an outsourcing company. I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the pros and cons of each of them. https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/how-to-hire-a-cto-for-a-startup/
i love this idea, even as a CTO-type myself.
i'm a bit surprised at some of the hate this and other good ideas get on this site. the "I'm really not trying to hate" excuses are pretty lame. i'm cool with actual constructive criticism, but too often it's just hatorade ankle-biting.
If you need a CTO for you CTO-as-a-service startup I'm with you :).
This is an interesting idea, indeed. My concern here is that CTO as a person is usually the most trusted technology leader of the company. And this leadership is a personal emotion in the team. I am not sure it's possible to replace this emotion with service.
What do you expect the service to do?
help CEO make tech decision and help the CEO to work with the freelancers (project manager)
You know if you take 5 CTOs they would likely make 5 different decisions around tech..
Project management is it's own thing.. you can probably easily hire one for a project?..
I'm kinda nitpicking to make you come to a more accurate explanation of what you want.. I think this is too high level to be useful.. it's like saying "I want a bride". would anyone do? do you have some expectations?..
Why not hire a CTO on a consultant site?..
Like I think I kind of get the frustration, but maybe it come out of going too wide and not being specific at what you want/need?
I'm really trying to help, to solve a thing you 1st need to define it well..
I agreed with @hatkyinc. Project management, tech consultation and CTO are very different things. Non-tech founders is also a very broad term to define founders who can't or choose not to code, as I believe many non-tech founders have different level of tech literacy (or many can learn just enough) to be able do certain level of project management.
I don't have a very good answer to what I or other non-tech founders want in a CTO but I think the differentiating factor is that the CTO has got to have skin in the game so the decisions he /she makes are in consideration of scalability, infra, tech stack, and even long term team building etc.
I agree with you, CTO should have skin in the game, to do that pair up CEO with CTO with equity can solve this, but then how can we achieve CTO as service? or CTO as service is not possible?
Maybe a starting point could be listing out a simple comparison of non-tech founders' responsibility / burden: pre VS post having CTO-as-a-service.
Without knowing what to achieve, it's hard to imagine how to achieve :)
Check out my sibling comment for a CTO-as-a-service business model that worked.