I Lost over $200k

What did you trust them to do?

I feel like I hear this sentiment fairly often in the context of startup mistakes, and I wonder if people simply have unrealistic expectations.

Developers write software, and they usually aren’t magicians. They can’t always turn poor instructions or bad ideas into world class software.

I’ve worked on teams where the software we were building simply wasn’t great. It would never be great without some degree of pivoting and addressing a market more appropriately with better solutions. This was never a developer’s fault, though. In fact the team could be killing in terms of getting the work done that they were asked to. Even so it often came down on the software team to do better somehow. Numbers aren’t right, we need to optimize. We need to do the thing faster. Joey spent two weeks doing X, that should never happen!

But even if Joey did X in two minutes, customers still wouldn’t be very excited. Organic growth would remain poor. Trials would not convert very well.

Some developers have a good enough sense of the bigger picture, business, marketing, their own trade, etc. and they can provide feedback and insight that’ll potentially help change course. This is rarely true or even sufficient in my experience. Developers are only one of the cogs in the software machine.

Did you team lie about their abilities? Did they falsely report hours worked? I’m really curious where your trust went and how you were let down.

I started working on my SaaS somewhere in 2016, and the first thing I did was hired a CTO. The person had around 3+ years of experience.

Not only was I paying a good salary, but I was also paying for his rent. When we started building the initial set of products, the overall product development kept getting delayed. He said we needed more developers, so we hired around 6-7+ developers.

All the developers were reporting my ex-CTO, and as per our mutual understanding, I was not allowed to have any say in how the product will be developed, and he will be offered full support and resources.

I agreed to that.

Several months passed, and the product was not ready, but I was also losing cash quickly. I was already under heavy stress because there was no flow of income for the product.

I met someone during this time who told me that I should launch my product, and some people will even buy during the alpha stage. I found it skeptical but fell for that trap because I was desperate to bring in more cash to keep the funding going on for the project.

This is where I made another mistake because I unknowingly ended up overpromising, and my team failed to deliver a quality product.

Over 1.5 years passed, and we still needed a stable product.

Over two years went by, and I still did not have a stable product, and this is when my ex-CTO quit, and a few other developers quit along with him when I realized that he used my resources to build his product and shortly flew out of the country.

..I ended up hiring an outside dev team with the little more money I had to keep my promise to the customers, but that did not go well either.

I had no money left; I had to shut the project completely because I had deep into reds and had gotten into heavy clinical depression.

> 1. Do not trust people blindly, especially your team.

> This was the number mistake my cofounder Oscar, and I made. We trusted our team blindly.

Your number-one mistake was trusting your team?

That sounds like it could be finger-pointing downwards by a leader, so you might want to expound, or reconsider.

For example, even if the entire startup team turned out to be dishonest and incompetent, weren't those clowns were hired and led by the founders? If so, the buck might stop with the founders, so maybe there's a better way to characterize and learn from the failure.