CTO Leaves Before PH Launch: What Came Later?

“With Clous, I’m out.” — co-founder said.

That happened to me 2 months ago. So here’s what happened.

I started to freak out by myself. I changed our entire roadmap. It took me a day and a half to re-do everything. I didn’t have any interactions for almost one day. One of those changes was our product launch in ProductHunt. We had it scheduled for the Tuesday that week. And our technical co-founder gave us the sad news just days before. We wouldn’t have the platform ready by then. But that entire week I took onto the product code and re-did some funnel UX to land users in our product. It wasn’t finished but we did have to launch or our team moral would go far down.

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, share it in the comments so others can navigate it as you did (or didn’t)!

We launched the following Wednesday, which also gave us a chance to catch up with the delayed marketing campaign. We could only dedicate 1.5 weeks to it.

Then I started fixing issues like talking with providers. Our first 2 weeks were dedicated to reducing technical debt. I took it really calmly. Even accepted the drop in user engagement because we were focused in other things. But 2 weeks in, we rallied up to 50 DAU by our own efforts. Now it has dropped again because I have been programming 60% of the time. It was necessary.

The communication quality with our co-founder was not our best metric. So there has always been some misalignment between product and engineering. There were many gaps in the technology possibilities of our software by the product team (me). But now that I’ve been coding for some weeks, I understand far better what our MVP should look like. And yeah, we’re not following the lean startup method.

It took us 14+ of problem and industry research and 5+ of MVP development. We’ve been building in public with low audience for months now, and we’re still confident we’ve got the solution. Taking things so slowly has allowed us to make various hard pivots even before starting. We hard-pivoted our product, go-to-market strategy and roadmap. We discovered many problems in the industry, not just one. We now decide which ones to tackle.

We also think a lot in the long-term. For example, the first thing we did was SEO. And we didn’t even know any of our customers! I can proudly say we have committed every error a first-time founder does in the early days.

After 2 months after our co-founder leaving these are our priorities:

• Data governance: we haven’t tracked our product with user clicks, but just pages. Also, MSFT Clarity analytics are giving some log errors and Analytics vs MixPanel give different data measuring our web.
• Product finalization: we have changed entirely what our GTM messaging and operations should look like because of our MVP changing. It goes from an Enterprise ATS combined with a Job Board, to an AI assistant for recruiters.

Wish us luck!