Free CTO Services/Consulting/Whatever
Hey all,
First, I suck at sales and none of my 4+ startups have ever been successful probably because I can't sell. So, I wish there was sales help out there for technical founders.
With that in mind, I wondered if there are sales people who wish there was technical help.
I've also seen a few startups that have wasted time/money on contracted developers.
Here's the deal: Reach out to me and I'll tell you honestly if I can help or not. I probably don't have time to actually write code or build your idea for you. But I can help you interview contractors, help you make sound tech decisions, potentially fire up AWS/Heroku/GCP/Azure/Git servers, help you consider InfoSec/privacy/data/encryption, etc. This is not a partnership request or looking to partner up; it's simply an offer of help/advice/input/planning.
I expect nothing in return.
I'm not offering this because I want to make money or "prey on idealistic startups". I'm doing this because I like to help and it pains me to see people make mistakes that'll haunt them. Being that its free help you'll have to be patient and if I get busy I might be slow to respond or have to say no to some people. I am always careful to set achievable expectations and be realistic about my capacity.
I'm not self-important, all knowing, or egotistical. If you can afford to hire a CTO I strongly suggest you go that route. A paid CTO will be more dedicated to their employer and devote time. I do have some valuable experience though:
- Been writing PHP for 20 years, had a Geocities account back in the day.
- Wrote Flash/ActionScript back in the day when it existed.
- Never used the <blink> tag but I know the joke behind it.
- I've run 6+ production web applications in my career and have handled everything from server setup, sever admin & automation, networking, hardware installation of rogue IT solutions, dev/staging/QA server setup, Git server setup, etc.4
- More recently I've become quite good with React and now expanding in Angular and Node.
- Worked a bit in Python and find I can pick it up again within 2 weeks of working full-time on it.
- Worked with MongoDB, SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, etc.
- Just finished a full rewrite/rebuild of a 10yr old PHP app that used tables within tables and mostly inline CSS. I rebuilt it to a client React app connecting to a PHP API with the front-end and back-end completely decoupled (except initially writing a security token to the session/cookie).
- Interviewed with a profitable tech company/startup that had off-shored all development and ended up in terrible technical-debt. So much debt that I turned the position down. The devs were using FTP and no dev server(s).
Message me on IH, Twitter, email, LinkedIn, etc. They all go to the same place and we can chat.
