This post will basically be a condensed note to myself in the future, but it might benefit you as well if you're interested in starting your own company. (Or if you already have a company.)
The topics are pretty random and are not ordered in anyway.
startup != consulting != ecommerce
I personally don't think opening an online web design firm or selling stuff online is essentially a startup. You might, but that's your opinion.
I think startups are companies that try to solve problems for the mass. Facebook for example, changed the way people interact. I don’t have the energy to call everyone of my friends in Thailand everyday, so I learn about them through Facebook. Facebook solved one of my problems.
If you have a good vision, then you'll be rewarded when you see your product help people.
When To Hire
My company has about 7 roles. At the beginning, the founder had to do all of them. As a result, he was too overwhelmed. That's when the hiring happened.
In established companies, you hire on a continuous basis because people leave all the time. However, in early-stage startups, you should hire from needs. If you spend too much time on customer support, you don't have time to improve your product. But if you don't answer customer calls, you'll end up losing business. You need a balance. If you're out of balance, it's probably time to hire.
Environment
Before I left my old job, I never thought work environment would be such a big deal, but it actually is. A big part of why I left my old job was that I was in a cube in a room with no windows and I developed wrist, back, and neck pain from sitting in that cube.
You don’t have to have a fancy office (and you probably won't have money to pay for an interior designer anyway), but the better-looking office will attract developers.
My advice is at least make the office look nice -- nice being if you invited your mom to the office, she wouldn’t complain.
Here are some concrete things that are good to have:
| computers that are fast enough | sufficient lighting | big tables | private rooms for meetings |
| air conditioning + heaters that work well | clean bathrooms | earphones | cupboards enough for everyone |
| chairs with neck rests | microwave(s) and fridge(s) | big windows | coffee/tea |
| water coolers or ice makers | coat hangers |
Do I need an accountant?
You certainly do, but you don't have to hire one. You only have to know where the money comes and goes so you know if you’re going out of business or not. Oh, and you need to pay tax correctly too. In my company, this is managed by another developer. She said she needed about three courses from a local community college to get from zero to workable knowledge. She spends one day each month for accounting.
Network Admin
It's good to have if you can afford one, but probably not. Server/network setup (including contacting the cable company) are skills that programmers can learn easily. It's just not fun when you do it a lot. I remember seeing the founder driving to Chicago (2 hours away) at 8pm to switch a hard disk in the data center.
One thing to note is that when you're small, there's not much security concerns to worry about. But once you're big enough to become a target of hackers (the bad type), you might need a network admin, or more of a network security expert.
How to grow? Do I need Sales / Marketing / Advertising?
You can probably do it by yourself for the first 10 customers, but if you want to scale, you need people to help. I'm stereotyping but most software developers don't have a gift for marketing.
At the first stage of your startup, try to get customers in the most straightforward way. It’s like hacking up a prototype. It doesn’t need to scale yet.
This includes cold calling as much target audience as you can. Ask your mom and friends to sign up and spread the word. Go to conferences and make direct connections. Ads don’t make sense yet at this stage. If you have enough income, hire a sales rep to help with this.
Customer Service
Again, you won’t need any until you get overwhelmed by calls. We tried outsourcing, but didn’t really work out. We lost the opportunity to know our customers better and improve our product.
So I think at an early stage, when you don’t have a lot of numbers to crunch on, the best source of customer feedback is support calls, so you want somebody inhouse.
Administrator (this is different than network admin)
A euphemism for “errand runner”. You as the company owner have to do everything from basic plumbing, to lighting installation, to making sure there are stationary and enough napkins. This is not too bad, because these things don’t happen too often. It’s just a little more work than taking care of your own two bedroom apartment with 5 other roommates.
Software Developers
Every role is important, but since I like to self-promote what I do, I personally feel that a company needs great software developers.
You’ll probably be looking for generalists who are not tied to a specific set of technologies, and don’t mind working on anything (including tedious stuff). You want somebody who can tolerate imperfect code to get things done, and at the same time, feel bad about imperfect code because it's not beautiful.
Perks
Many startups can afford to buy their employees all the meals they want, some companies just can’t. But that doesn’t mean you have to be cheap. Once in a while, you can take your employees out. My company buys us lunch once a week. That’s a good perk given the size of our company. As a general rule, be generous with perks if it improves work efficiency and teamwork, and as long as it’s reasonable.
Pay
Of course you don’t have 250k to pay your employees, but do research to find what’s a competitive market pay in your area and at least match that. You should never lose a good employee because of your pay was too low. In other words, if you hired the right person, they'll likely work for the job not as much for the pay, as long as the pay can maintain their lifestyle.
Flexible work hours
A reasonable way of thinking is: as long as you get the job done, it doesn’t really matter that much what your work hours are. If your employee needs to see the dentist or take his/her cat to the vet, by all means, be flexible and your employees will love the job.
Funding
Angel investors and venture capitals (VCs) are not the only sources of seed funding. If you start a business with a market that exists, you will get your first paying customers. You can use the revenue to bootstrap your business.
VCs have pros and cons. You are advised by very experienced people, so you have a higher rate of success. On the other hand, since VCs invested and have equity, you have to listen to them and sometimes do something you don’t entirely want to do.
Everybody is involved
One of the best things about startups is you have input on anything, be it the processes to use, the tools we use, the color of the lights, which soda to buy, everything.
I find it really rewarding when somebody as smart as my company leader asks input from me. If you’re the company leader, you should listen to your employees as much as you can.
Coworkers
This is one of the most important things about startups. Of course, you would need somebody with skills. But as importantly, you have to make sure everybody is a great fit culturally.
In startups, you can’t afford to hire the wrong person. Make sure that cultural fit is one of the highest priorities. When you don’t have 200 teams, you can’t avoid seeing the wrong person everyday.
When interviewing a potential coworker, include questions that will show their personalities. For example, try finding something the candidate totally disagrees and see his/her reaction to that. If the candidate uses strong words like “stupid” or “hate”, that’s a bad sign.
Use open source and open your source when you can
Most of the time, open source code is a great way to save cost. Try finding open source libraries as much as you can, but if buying software licenses will save you cost more than the time wasted finding the right open source software, by all means, spend your money on it.
You want to look for liberal licenses which don’t force you to release your source code. My favorites are BSD, MIT, and Apache licenses. I’ll blog about the differences one day.
And at some point, don’t forget to give back to society and open source what you can. Just be careful not to open source stuff that your competitors can use to kick you out of business.
Have a research mind
There’s a lot of knowledge out there you can leverage. Having at least somebody with an MS or preferably higher in your team, who is used to reading research papers, will widen your point of views. We’ve applied solutions from at least 3 papers already in our system and have plans for future directions.
Not only research papers, but generally if you’re looking to solve hard problems, a lot of times when you include “site:edu” in your Google searches, you can find out how the academia solves it.
Even if you end up using nothing. Just reading for the sake of knowledge is fun enough (if you really enjoy what you do).
Meetings
Don’t meet unless you have to. Multiple short meetings is better than one big meeting. Anything over 35 minutes might lose people’s attention.
The end
I hope you find this post useful. Feel free to send me comments on what you agree or disagree. I’d love to hear from other people who work at startups too, especially learning what went well and what didn’t.
But anyway, happy one year (and 40000+ lines of code) anniversary to me! XD
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