Startup Advice: Lessons Learned from Building a Development Team

Over the past few months, I’ve explored a bunch of different ways to develop a website without a web developer on the Blank Label team. To summarize My coding capabilities are almost non-existent, we don’t have an in-house expertise, we don’t have the money to pay for a developer, and have struggled to bring developers on board. However, we've learned several lessons, gathered some advice, and now have a couple of suggestions and better plan in place.

Let me give you the run down of what we tried, what lessons we learned, and what we recommend to others in a similar position.

Given we had no expertise in-house at the start of the summer, we outsourced a fairly sizable project to a small team of student developers. It turned out to be a terrible decision. When you’re on a bootstrap budget, anything is tough, but this turned out to be especially taxing. The thing with students, and myself included, is we’re usually unrealistic and overly optimistic when it comes to deadlines and the numerous hurdles along the way. Naturally, experience brings expectations for bottlenecks, delays, and a realistic plan that can be executed in a realistic amount of time. On top of little experience, communication has been poor, and the project is now delayed over two months. It came as a surprise to us as we thought we did our due diligence...the guys were referred to me from trusted sources with moderately high compliments.

Due to the delay, we started looking elsewhere for our other web development projects. On a bootstrapped budget free is great. We spent a lot of time asking everyone we knew if they knew anyone who would be looking to intern with a startup. We’ve had some success with hiring interns for fashion design and editorial work, so we were hoping to replicate that with a coder, even in basic HTML, CSS and PHP. With a lot of asking, and a few interviews later, we managed to find an intern who works with us 15 hours a week.

We also tried off-shore developing, which actually turned out to be a good experience. Originally. we tried to stay away from off-shore developing due to the numerous horror stories of delays and budget blowouts we've heard about. But, it had to be better than our on-shore outsourced solution! Turns out, it has been moderately good.

There’s definitely a learning curve, but for anywhere between $7-$25 an hour for experienced coders, it’s hard to deny. I personally go through ODesk, but the other popular ones are RentaCoder.com and eLance.com. I would recommend trying to run a couple of projects in parallel so you’re later able to cherry pick the better developer and then work on establishing a longer-term relationship, even having them as an extension of your team. The most important thing though is communication. You need to be as explicit and detailed in your instructions as well. Whatever you have in your head, take the time to describe as specific as possible, to leave as little room for error and interpretation as possible.

For additional advice, I recommend reading "Finding a Technical Partner for your Startup), by Daniel Kehoe, a CTO Consultant, who was kind enough to hear my struggles out and offered advice suggesting that we should supplement our current Advisory Board with a Technical Advisor. He explained that this would help us better bridge the gap between our inexperience and choosing the right lead developers.

Starting a company while being a student is tough. Especially when you need external resources, don't have the cash flow for compensation, and not enough traction for equity to be considered valuable. I’m curious to hearing about the experiences of other student entrepreneurs who've faced this problem.

I’ll probably post something in a couple of months if I’m able to learn more about this, especially as a follow up post on finding a technical advisor and a lead developer. A lot of people have asked me about it, so I feel it is a fairly important issue for student entrepreneurs.

And if any current CTOs are looking to advise or mentor a fast-moving, energetic, student run startup, we’d love to talk to you.