Hot answers tagged team
12
Yeah the key bit is to get in the agreement early what the KPIs are going to be.
When nothing moves on their side continously between meetings.
When you can't agree on the direction of the company.
When you aren't spending the majoirty of your time together, and it isn't because sales are pulling you apart.
When everything else is more important.
When all ...
10
I think it's definitely possible not to have office space. However, working without ever meeting any other people in person is much more difficult (but not impossible).
I worked in a startup where we didn't have an office but we were all in the same city so we held meetings in cafes or at my place. The main inconvenience of not having an office was meeting ...
9
Don't give away your equity without careful thought, planning and an attorney. It complicates everyone's life in so many ways if it is not done correctly.
A much simpler way is to profit share with key employees. Setting aside a percentage of profits to be split among key employees shows generous gratitude and gives them a stake in the past and present ...
8
You seem to have good intentions, so it would be a shame to spoil a good thing by giving them something they don't want. It doesn't sound like the subject of their getting equity has come up. They may like the fact that they are not tied to the company (They may be reluctant to leave if it means losing too much in the process.).
You may be shocked at what ...
7
A few thoughts:
If you're a team of guys who have worked closely together before, then working remotely will be a lot easier. The relationship part is important -- you need to know where someone's coming from. Even so, try and physically meet up as much as poss to have some fun every few weeks or months to keep that relatedness and 'sense of team' going.
...
7
If it was a local team I would say it is due to boring work. Great developers take motivation out of building great software. Maintenance periods, too much bug fixing, doing the same thing for too long are examples of things that will make their productivity go down.
In a remote team, you can take all of that in consideration, plus the fact that they might ...
6
Here at Stack Exchange, we have chat software. We are using our own, but HipChat is acceptable. There is a main room in there that everyone is expected to be in (at least lurking) whenever they are at work... not being in the chat room is equivalent to not being at your desk. This has done wonders at creating a coherent company culture with people who are ...
5
The biggest problem it's about how the learning process of the employees. It's very difficult to teach about the market, technical information or even create a company culture spending little time together.
I think a distributed team works only if your employees have very good experience in the market and the technical aspects of your product, and this ...
5
Very similar points, just expressed a different way:
One feels and acts like they're in charge (in an equal partnership/split)
When you dread their number coming up on caller ID
When one doesn't want to deviate from the "dream" when the market is telling you loud and clear to change direction
When a job starts to seem desirable
When you have to leave ...
4
Start with assigning single ownership to all the roles/functional areas that you guys do within your company. Discuss why that's important, agree that your current process wastes a lot of time that could be better used getting things done. That person has the final say over that role.
Create a Roles & Responsibilities document. This can be a simple one ...
4
Great question. My feeling is that when you sense they will not be an A (or event B) player in the project.
That said, there is nothing like having amazing co-founders so before you drop people, realize they are people and human beings, and try to find out why they are not performing. Don't become a psychologist, but make sure they have what they need to ...
4
The number one problem with consulting? It's like heroin. The first taste is awesome, but then you need more and more.
The beautiful thing about your SaaS product is that you keep the lights on and people keep paying. You might fix a bug or two or work on some new features, but your income horizon potentially is pretty long (especially if you have ...
4
There are two different markets of consulting that you could consider as a SaaS company. There is the one that you alluded to -- which is the conversion of your internal technology team to be a job shop for potentially multiple of external clients to supplement the revenue from the primary venture.
There is a second -- which is the adding consulting as a ...
4
A good start would be to limit yourself to asking questions instead of giving answers.
"Why is this code all in one file?"
"What are some ways you could make the code easier for new developers to understand?"
Etc. Your questions can be pretty leading but you're just asking questions, which prevents people from going on the defensive.
4
It depends.
What information are your customers looking for on your web site? What are you trying to let them know with your about page?
The number of people doesn't really matter. For example our whole team is just two full time people - and we have both of those people up on the home page - let alone the about page. Because what we sell to our clients is ...
3
I would say that unless you have a very big pot of money, you need to do something yourself. I think that even with a big pot of money, you should take care of critical things yourself. You should for example make drafts of the design yourself. My poibt is that it is your idea and your vision and there are only so much you can communicate to others. By ...
3
I just want to add that (as a technical person), what you're looking to develop is NOT a simple product. You want:
android app
iPhone app
iPad app
web/extranet app
web/intranet app
mobile (other) app
windows forms app
That's a ridiculous amount of coding, no matter how you slice it.
Focus your idea. Make it something that you can either build or have ...
3
I've run a hot-desking centre and fund-raised (successfully) for an incubator. My observation is that there are two counter-trends.
Fully remote teams seem to drain energy and increase stress. Weekly or fortnightly physical meetings seem to me the bare minimum. Actually, having been involved in facilitating a local Jelly, that's true even for freelancers ...
3
If you're at an impasse, decide which person feels more strongly about it.
That is, it's easy to get caught up in the argument and forget that, actually, it doesn't matter to you that much what the decision is. If either way has pros and cons, then maybe neither of you really know which is best anyway.
Therefore, if it matters more to one person, why not ...
3
There are plenty of investors that would rather go for a 2-person engineer team with no seasoned management as long as the engineers are good, the implementation is solid and the business model is good. The VCs can bring in the seasoned management and help you assemble a team.
A VC, who'd also been a CEO for 35 years, told me just that. Hope that helps. ...
3
It's a great idea to work hard and have fun with a team. And you can do a lot in a week...
A cautionary note is that if you have a great time, it's easy to get emotionally over-committed to that v1. Maybe it'll be a great product, or maybe it'll be the makings of a great team. Get trusted, critical friends to help you discover which you have on your hands ...
3
It does when your not full time developing "for yourself".
It makes sense:
Your people are now domain experts in your field. If you can teach a computer what it should do successfully then your miles ahead of other people who haven't. This is very valuable when sold properly.
Your Saas offering becomes "part of" the overall offering. Both feed off each ...
3
You state that you were tasked to look for code that:
perform[ed] poorly
or
may have bugs
I think you are a little bit off the reservation on this one with the desire to have beautiful more maintainable code.
You won't win points with management taking time away from new features to rewrite working code. However, I am sure they will all ...
3
First things first: You're now operating a business. By most standards, once you start selling a product or service, you're a business. In most jurisdictions, if you aren't properly licensed, you can find yourself in a bit of a legal bind with your local or federal authority, even if you think of yourself as just a bunch of friends working on a common ...
3
First, incubators vary a lot. That applies to how they select teams, what they're offering and what they take in return. So look at each one that interests you, and as, if and when you apply, show you understand and value their proposition.
Second, talent, energy, commitment and teamwork are high up in the list of what pretty much every general incubator ...
3
Why do you want VCs? Have you considered angel investment? As a solopreneur you're more likely to get angel funding than VC funds. VCs like to see solid teams and solid propositions before they give you a pile of cash.
At this stage I would look for a co-founder or mentor that can take you through the early stages of building the business. My advice ...
3
Looking at the information you have laid out, even 20 people answering here won't help you. It is already getting convoluted, especially since people expect equity for having an idea, which is wroth zero without execution. There are 7 billion people in the world and I guarantee you about a thousand have the same idea right now. Only those who execute on ...
3
You are going about this all wrong.
Forcing them to sign a written document under these circumstances is only going to create ill will. So you'll be starting off on bad terms - not a good thing. Second, just because they sign the document saying they'll do work, doesn't mean they are actually going to do work. The document in itself can't force them to do ...
3
If you're a B2B business i would strongly recommend not to do so:
it makes you look small and unreliable.
if your personal backgrounds are less than very attractive, there's no point in doing so because your customers might look you up on linkedin or something of that sort.
your competitors may check your backgrounds and connections and learn a lot about ...
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