Startup Engineering for Non-Technical Founders

1. GROWTH HACKING ASIA STARTUP ENGINEERING

2. STARTUP ENGINEERING PUTTING SOMETHING ON THE MARKET Outsourcing vs Building a Team Choosing your Technology Stack Managing your Product Not always a case of black and white, what are the pros and cons and more importantly, how do you know when to pick one over the other. What programming language and framework do you build your product on, and where do you deploy it to. How to make use of readily available tools to make things easier for your team. 2

3. ON HIRING AND OUTSOURCING STARTUPS HAVE SUCCEEDED (AND FAILED) WITH BOTH HIRING AND OUTSOURCING FIND OUT WHAT’S RIGHT FOR YOU OUTSOURCE EARLY HIRE WHEN READY PAY FOR QUALITY Early stage startups face great difficulties building a team. It’s easier to outsource it, unless a co- founder can built it. Hire your team once you’ve achieved product market fit and raised enough capital to build the team right. Pay for quality, or pay anyway. Find outsourcing partners that can provide additional value, not just an extra pair of hands. 3

4. OUTSOURCING VS HIRING “It’s expensive to work with cheap people” 4 http://www.codelitt.com/blog/how-to-handle-client-comparing-hourly-to-cheap-overseas-development/

5. EARLY STAGE STARTUPS AND HUMAN RESOURCES You Have No Bargaining Power Experience Managing a Product Team It’s Not Your Main Focus Good hires have tonnes of opportunities. You will be forced to settle. Gets expensive if you are offering equity. Assuming you cobble together a team, made up of freelancers and friends, your challenge now is to make all this somehow work. Founders have many responsibilities; hiring a team and managing it to build a product can take away a lot from customer development, fundraising, etc. 5

6. BUILDING A TEAM You Have Traction, People Want to Join You’ve Hired Your CTO, Right? You’re Ready to Go All In Cool product bro! You have product market fit, hire away! No major pivots at this point. Your first developer needs to be top dog, otherwise other good developers will not join. Building a tech team is a long term commitment. Retention can be a problem if developers are not sufficiently engaged. Do you have a good runway, and an exciting roadmap? 6

7. OUTSOURCE! Choosing Between Cheap & Expensive Fixed bid vs Time & Materials Dedicated vs Shared Team Don’t take prices at face value. Cheap software development comes at a very high cost! Fixed bid doesn’t always mean lower risk, chances are, it increases it. Are the developers you work with burdened with several projects at a time? 7

8. HIRING YOUR CTO Technically competent and a leader No technical knowledge, get help Is he or she future proof? It’s important to hire a CTO that can lead and coach the team. Great developers don’t want to work in a team where they are not able to grow. How do you ensure the quality of CTO, when you don’t come from a technical background? Find a friend, or hire someone who has been there, done that. CTOs need to be able to wear multiple hats. At an early stage, they are expected to build product, and to scale out the engineering team at a later stage. Vest their equity accordingly. 8

9. TECH STACKS CHOICE OF TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T MATTER UNTIL IT DOES OPTIMISE FOR AGILITY LESS IS MORE INVEST IN THE RIGHT CULTURE Early stage startups: it’s alright if your app is not scalable now. Scale up when you have funds and traction. There’s no shame in building things the ‘wrong way’ first. Use this to your advantage by keeping complexity low. If you want to hire good developers later on, you need to understand what it takes to build software. 9

10. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Image retrieved from https://github.com/system-engineering-hdm/ScalaDeploymentApp/wiki/Amazon-Web-Services

11. http://stackshare.io/stacks 11

12. A PRIMER TO WEB AND MOBILE APPS What is a backend of a web or mobile app? What is the front-end of a web app? What about mobile apps? Backend includes server (where your app is hosted) and database (where your data is stored) technologies. It is a web application that can serves your web front- end, or talks to your mobile app. You may have heard of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. These are bits of code that are read by the web browser, much like how MS Word opens .docx files. Mobile app developers typically do a mix of backend and front-end work. Front-end work on mobile is different from that of the web. 12

13. DB BACKEND API WEB BROWSERS MOBILE APPS 13

14. EARLY STAGE STARTUPS AND TECHNOLOGY STACKS Optimise For Agility, Not Scalability Shaving Pennies Don’t Always Add Up Be Prepared To Throw Away Code You are looking for product- market fit, so you need to be able to test your validations as fast as possible. Don’t optimize prematurely. Save money where it counts, but don’t choose the $10 hosting plan over the $30 when it is going to cost you developer time. Sunk cost is sunk cost. Code is really good at holding businesses back, figure out your next steps and throw bad code away. 14

15. GETTING IT RIGHT Invest in Code Quality & Automated Testing Don’t Reinvent the Wheel Avoid Major Code Rewrites Your technology is a first class business concern, and you should treat it that way. If you do not invest your team into building your product the right way, you will lose talent. Stand on the back of giants, by using well-built open source libraries. Sometimes, it makes sense to write your own, but be wary of the total cost of ownership (TCO). Rewrites are more costly than planned for, and can kill a startup. Typically worthwhile as a strategic play for larger companies, and even then rarely. If you rewrite, treat it as a new product. 15

16. ON PRODUCT MANAGEMENT BUILDING THE RIGHT FEATURES AT THE RIGHT TIME LEARN PRIORITIZE OPTIMIZE Product management is not so much a process for building, as it is for learning. Saying that everything is important is a failure to prioritize, and will eventually lead to project failure. Improve the process for building and testing features organically, one step at a time. 16

17. EARLY STAGE STARTUPS AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT Validate Ideas with Non-Product MVPs Come up with Visual Specifications Once Again, Less Features is More Identify key assumptions and validate them with experiments that cost next to nothing. Don’t start with building a product right off! Start with user stories, simple sentences that describe the value of features you are building. Use sketches and storyboards to flesh out detail. Building the entire product outright is risky use of time if we don’t if people will use the features. Find out what went right or wrong. 17 https://medium.com/@mdubakov/visual-specifications-1d57822a485f

18. BACKLOG IN-PROGRESS DONE 18 Source: Running Lean, Ash Maurya

19. BACKLOG IN-PROGRESS DONE 19 Source: Running Lean, Ash Maurya

20. VALIDATED LEARNING BACKLOG IN-PROGRESS DONE PARTIAL ROLLOUT VALIDATE QUALITATIVELY FULL ROLLOUT VERIFY BACKLOG IN-PROGRESS DESIGN CODE QUANTITATIVELY FEATURES BUGS 20 Source: Running Lean, Ash Maurya

21. TOOLS 21

22. TINKERBOX STACK TYPICAL DEPLOYMENT SETUP AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENTS 3 PRODUCTION GITHUB STAGING 2 1 CIRCLE CI CODECLIMATE APPSIGNAL CLOUDFLARE (CDN) SLACK TEST COVERAGE CODE QUALITY CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT On average, our projects score 87.17% test coverage, based on 27 of our recent projects, giving us confidence in our codebases. We employ static code analysis on our codebases, using CodeClimate. On average, we scope a GPA of 3.59 (max 4.0), of 34 projects. Using Heroku, or equivalent set up, we configure automated pipelines for deploys to our staging & production environments. 22

23. WWW.TINKERBOX.COM.SG BUILD WEB AND MOBILE APPS THE RIGHT WAY JARYL SIM Jaryl has been programming for about 15 years, starting off with C/C++. He has been writing ruby & rails since 2007. EMAIL JARYL@TINKERBOX.COM.SG GITHUB HTTPS://GITHUB.COM/JARYL TWITTER HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/JARYL 23