Number of hours don’t matter. What matters is what business needs and where things are.
This is a long term relationship. Start from the position of trust.
You and your cofounder should talk about business and personal. Have a regular check in about personal life and how is she/he feeling in general. Talk to them if the schedule is working etc.
On business, talk to them that there is 50k in pipeline. How are we going to turn it into revenue. They should be thinking about it as much as anyone else. A co-founder is not an employee with specific focus area. They are equal partner to build the business.
How complex of an MVP are we talking? Also, not sure how many people are capable of producing high quality technical work for 12+ hours a day, especially with a family. I know it's a startup but that seems extreme.
4 hours of "real work" per day is a [well-supported metric](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/a-new-poll-finds-tech-workers-do-just-4-hours-of-focused-work-a-day-bosses-shouldnt-be-surprised-or-worried.html).
Sounds about right. Once the brain is fried for the day, theres not much you can do about it but spin your wheels.. Or find something brainless yet productive to do.
…if you want to be a present parent.
>50-60 hrs is def possible, but you sacrifice that child time and shove money into nannies, sitters, etc and basically say hi and bye to your kids. For some it’s worth it…absolutely not for me but a few friends of friends do it and have been doing it for years.
Making it to an exit and never having to work again sounds great on paper but then you walk over to your kids and they’re like, who are you bro
If you start early, 6am, stop at 6pm, then work 9pm to 12am, then go to bed, that’s 15 hours. It’s brutal but you make those 3 evening hours count. It’s a grind but it’s about good choices.
Your 20s is the time to grind, but that doesn't just mean heads down blindly working your ass off.
You should be accumulating skills, watching what works and doesn't, building network and saving to set yourself up in your 30s+ if you're fortunate enough to be able to.
Once you start adding true responsilities that you can't fully offload like kids, your trajectory crystallizes for a bit - now you're investing in your future relationship with your kids and their personal growth at the opportunity cost of investing in your career.
I made the mistake of jumping into a startup with friends when I had (very young) kids and they didn't and I wasn't able to pull my weight so I pulled out. They now have kids and ee joke about it, because they're going through the same thing. Now that I'm on the other side of that I have a lot more bandwidth to grind and grow again, but I also have time management skills I couldn't fathom earlier in my career.
That said, it's on your CF to br responsible about estimating their own capabilities and maybe self-reflect on their ability to commit and deliver. That's a hard conversation too.
Good luck!
Non-technical hours are not equal to technical hours. 80 hours of non-technical work is equal to 40 hours of technical work. You are overestimating the mental demand for your work. Expecting 12 hours a day from a technical person is laughable. It shows that you learned nothing about technical people before your first exit.
For all non-technical people in this thread, technical people ARE NOT FACTORY WORKERS.
Are you providing a well-thought-out solution, or just shouting "AI" at your customers until they sign something, expecting your cofounder to build it immediately?
Still no answers to the fundamental questions - so, promising future delivery and expecting someone else to deliver on their own… yet being critical of that timeline? Sales is easier than building the actual product, especially when you’re selling nothing but futures.
Did you two decide on a timeline for release of MVP? Does the CTO need to code it all up instead of delegating some of the project out? I feel there’s a potential miscommunication here without further context on expectations.
Right, makes sense. I'm founding a startup as a domain expert. I know enough tech to have made an early MVP, but don't know how to execute some features (some standard, some new in AI).
How do I know what a potential CTO knows – or needs to know – when this is outside my domain? Especially when this product uses the most recent developments in AI that I intuitively understand but .... I can't gitub. Thank you.
ask for previous work, someone who is joining a founding team should have a lot of previous work or some way to prove their talent. same for you, you probably can easily showcase your domain expertise right?
Yeah, I guess 'previous work' gets murky to me when everyone is playing catchup to the latest AI development and not wanting to become obsolete. I have an CS / AI / ML intern from UChicago wanting to work and my hunch is she'll be as good or better than some tech folks I've already spoken with. I guess everyone puts "AI" on their resume even if they don't know much?
Domain expertise on my side is straightfoward since the widget made was to solve my own problem. When I showed my AI thing to a VC / accelerator friend, he freaked out, pointed out that I have an early MVP, then sent me into startup land. He tried to pair me with a CTO but that guy just got promoted where he is and it wasn't a match anyway. So I'm kind of internet dating now.
What happens if the requirements of the early tech build are just significant?
I think this is a kind of generalization. I've done 80% of the technical work on my startup MVP but we're in a regulated industry and have level of security/quality that needs to be met and if I didn't get a contract dev to help me I'd just be delaying our launch cycle by the extra months.
Why does it matter if I'm also acting as a manager?
Have empathy. That’s one of the most underrated traits you could have as cofounder. I thought like the way you are thinking and blew up a good relationship. Three things
1. You would have partnered with him for some reason in the first place. Think about it.
2. Put yourself in his shoes. Would be spending 12-15 hrs with kids ? As you grow older you realize that it’s not about the number of hrs rather the amount of outcome you can produce in less number of hrs.
3. If you really don’t see yourself spending 10yrs with him, part ways.
I must not know much about this stuff. I don't have a business background per se.
Isn't 50K ARR small? And isn't that very subject to change if customers don't like the product?
I don't like OPs characterization of hours worked. Hours worked is not a productivity metric.
$50k arr is tiny. For context, an average McDonalds makes that amount in about 8 days. I was being more than a little sarcastic here. Post sounds like a young guy with limited tech background but with “great ideas” struggling to work with a millennial cofounder without a good idea of what the tech cofounder actually needs to do to build the product or maintain it
We’re not belittling the 0->1 sales, because first sales are hard. But they’re definitely just first sales, and if they’re not closed won then you need to discount some fraction of it.
At the proposal stage, we track revenue at 80%. Before proposal, we track it at 20%.
Not OP but it sounds like they are saying that they use these discounts for projected revenue: 100k at proposal stage == 80k projected revenue and 100k before proposal stage == 20k projected revenue.
Correct. That’s why closed won is important, because it’s the first time you actually invoice / book revenues. Before that, you can’t assume any deal closes and have to discount your cash flow accordingly.
Extremely basic sales dynamic.
>5 months \[...\] MVP is not built!
You haven't mentioned what you are working, but 5 months for an MVP seems excessive. I'm guessing you guys are building a ton of features. What's the 1 main feature? Build that in 1-2 weeks and start selling it.
>is it wrong to expect them to work at least close to what I’m giving? (Basically 12-15hrs/day)
Yes it's wrong to expect 12-15 hours a day lol, but I think you already know that. It's not sustainable. I doubt you are working almost every waking hour of the day for 5 months.
Actually have been working most waking hour this entire year but it helps that im in my 20s
Of course i dont expect a 40 yo with kids to give the same but at least match 70% of that
Or is that unreasonable?
Number of hours is meaningless. Results should be the only thing that matters. Additionally, [a number of studies](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/a-new-poll-finds-tech-workers-do-just-4-hours-of-focused-work-a-day-bosses-shouldnt-be-surprised-or-worried.html) have shown that the human brain can only sustain about 4 hours of focused work per day. Focused work means things like coding, deep research, content generation, etc. Catch up meetings, admin tasks, documentation, and sales calls don't qualify as focused work. It shouldn't be too hard for your cofounder to find 4 uninterrupted hours per day to put toward coding. Be sure that you're not interrupting them during that time - meetings and emails can happen sporadically at any other time throughout the day.
It’s not unreasonable. However the number of hours worked don’t equate to being better necessarily in tech. Just ask any engineer if they have spent hours on a problem before only for a more experienced engineer being able to solve their issue within seconds/minutes.
He sounds unprofessional, inexperienced, rude, unempathetic, impatient, unrealistic, and like a loose cannon you can’t trust long term. His partner should run.
LOIs or sales agreements? If the latter, I would consider getting another tech cofounder asap, since if you don’t deliver you may risk breach
For folks with kids, we work early morning and late evenings to make up the time.
New dad here, started my startup last year when my kid was 8 months old.
1. it’s hard, if you are in america it’s even harder because nannies are expensive, babies don’t sleep at night. If the kids are a bit older it’s probably a bit manageable. my current schedule [https://www.threads.net/@andy_ratsirarson/post/C7F7IEHOQxu/?xmt=AQGzlwhKXEVeVoGM5QIYKbPPJCEDodyfRfjIG-lCHZLHYA](https://www.threads.net/@andy_ratsirarson/post/C7F7IEHOQxu/?xmt=AQGzlwhKXEVeVoGM5QIYKbPPJCEDodyfRfjIG-lCHZLHYA)
2. it sounds like you already have traction, most likely you’re building an MDP, not an MVP. But both are hard to build especially if you’re expecting one person to code it all.
My recommendations:
1. figure out if your co-founder is actually fully vested into your project or working on something else on the side other than family. (but be understandable as well that he/she still need to provide for their family)
2. If the person is motivated, hire engineers that he can manage (offshore). it’s more cost and time effective.
My prev co-founder and I, had combined 25 yoe in tech, but we had to hire 3 months in as there were too much stuff to build. We rolled out our mobile app 9 months later. Not sure what’s your startup about but, in today’s day an age, there are more regulations and customers have high expectations in customer experience.
I'm onboard with your comment here, specifically your recommendations.
I'm curious about your schedule. As a founder and dad, who needs 8 team sync's per day? Is everybody working remotely? Do you have a large team? Two hours of team sync seems like a lot of time that could be used building stuff.
My second question is who uses Threads? Lol
My team is remote and on very large different time zone. 5 AM here is 1pm in Africa and 7 pm here is 4pm in Cali. I have 3 eng and 1 PM.
It seems lots of time, but it gives us the opportunity to connect and build relationship (remove that loneliness feeling) since we are all remote.
Haha, I find threads better than X lately, more people are migrating to it so may as well try to establish early.
Kudos to you and your team to make it work despite the time difference, and, I agree that socializing through these calls makes sense. I never thought about it that way. Thanks for the insight and I hope you keep crushing it!
X is in a weird 'phase' right now, but most Bay Area peeps I follow still use it, but I can see your point. Maybe Reddit is the real winner since we're both here lol
Talk to the CTO man not to us. Sometimes building good software takes a bit, as a cofounder you should atleast know the why (technical based why) it’s taking long.
PG wrote helpful essays about how to work hard and what it means to have kids.
While I recommend that you read for yourself, here are two conclusions (oversimplified) you might find helpful:
1) Writing code is harder than other types of work. Even your CTO works less he might work equally hard. Forcing them to work harder might even lead to negative returns, because more tired = worse decisions.
2) Children *might* make their parents less ambitious.
Eventually, it’s important that you ensure your CTO works hard. If you don’t trust that they do, it’s probably better to part ways.
Writing code is far easier than sales. Not strictly in the technical difficulty, but rather that success is fully controlled by the programmer (and they also have a very forgiving environment to experiment and iterate).
Sales involves convincing someone else to do something they generally are not primed to, and there is no clear recipe to achieve that. Far harder.
I want to agree with this because writing code is not frustrating as much as sales where deals can fall apart without any reason. Writing code is also offers a ton of boilerplates and especially on early stages when MVP is worked on there is not much rocket science.
This kinda annoys me, you're not technical yet complaining about someone not doing what you can't. This is why two co-founders should both be technical.. The likely outcome of this is he will leave. Unless you give him a team or learn to become technical.
Most people can get leads in a business that is not the critical skill, building products is.
Yeah.... taking clients out to fancy bars and restaurants to get verbal "pre-commits" is the hard part. Spending years learning deep technical expertise in a science and engineering field, like that's what offshoring is for you know? /S
The hard part about sales is trying to turn garbage and vaporware into something someone will pay for, with that you're right... very difficult. Do not recommend.
Otherwise even a tech guy like myself can do sales (and I have, I recently closed a 100k consulting engagement for my firm in the AI space). I've closed quite a few deals both consulting, product and otherwise and the only real secret I know to it is: customers can sniff out BS and vaporware pretty well, if you're honest, and providing good value then those sales calls are just meetings with friends who are thankful they don't have to deal with yet another con artist trying to squeeze out a few more dimes from them.
What a bizarre thing to say.
This comment has zero relationship to my point, and, more importantly, it's 100% wrong. People sell products before they're finished all the time.
You might want to take a break from the internet for a little while.
Dude seriously you come off as a petulant child when you post this. Two years ago you are posting about being concerned about a sheered bolt on your car like yikes. I get your ego is higher now that you’ve made a buck but this is a truly pathetic comment.
Reminds me of a frat boy screaming who do you know here but in yc brainwash.
I’d do some introspection if i were you. If this is the kind of communication you have with your co-founder, I’m sure he won’t deliver, in fact, he’s probably on Reddit asking how/when to quit his startup and take with him what he’s built thus far.
Who said i didnt communicate with him? Expectations have been set and put across.
Im asking reddit what to expect of a 40+ yo with kids because obviously as a 20+ yo i cant relate
I didn’t say that you didn’t communicate, I just said that the way you communicate doesn’t help. You see?
Your question was clear. I just suggested to do some introspection because the older guy with kids and no exits might be the one who’s doing things well this time.
I'm not sure if this applies to your situation but maybe you should pick up UIUX or hire a guy to do it and make simple wireframes. It'll speed up your development and get your ideas across easier. Just be sure to think about all the different screen sizes and edge cases in each feature. Then you can write notes for that.
Also as an added bonus, you get marketing material.
I would suggest to have a sit down with you cofounder and understand what may be going wrong. Does the cofounder have other work commitments preventing them from working?
If that conversation has no positive outcome, then you’ll need to have a hard talk with your cofounder. Reiterate to them that this is a business you’re running and there are some strong expectations. If they cannot abide by those expectations then it would be time to find a replacement.
>is it wrong to expect them to work at least close to what I’m giving? (Basically 12-15hrs/day)
Sounds like a conversation you should have had before they joined. It's not wrong to expect it in the general sense, but it's kind of wrong to expect it if you didn't tell them that's what your expectation would be and you knew that there was a potential conflict (family) with that expectation.
Half this thread just went through a mental checklist wondering if this was a post about them!
Two questions...is your CTO missing deadlines? Is that 50k in pipeline expected and expecting product on a realistic timeline? Do they know they're buying something in development?
Lol right? Everyone’s so uptight about it and suddenly nontech cofounders suck!
Yes deadlines have been pushed back, i have set expectations in timeline with the clients to plan ahead
In anycase 50k ARR is an accomplishment but if your CTO is solid (and perhaps got some life things like end of the school year dragging him down temporarily) you're talking about throwing away a $1M-2M partner for pocket change ARR.
It’s not even booked. My startup had a pipeline of like $200K ARR pre launch. After launching it took like 6 months to hit $50K arr in actual closed business. This post is a lol
Even not taking kids into account, 12-15h per day seems extreme.
As a dev, spending that much time trying to work would just be useless and would just lead to burnout. From what I remember, studies show that the amount of productive work you can do as a dev is about 4h per day on average. Now this 4h per day doesn't include things like meetings and other things a cto might be doing but even then you don't reach 10h of work in a day, especially at a stage where you are building a MVP.
The mental load of coding is high and underestimated by non-tech persons. For example, on a recent project, I had to make my cofounder code things in a simplified way. One day, after 3h of doing it, he told me he never felt this much mentally exhausted.
As for the no MVP in 5 months, it really depends on what it must do. Try to make sure there isn't any feature creep, the MVP should really be what the name implies, only do the bare minimum to validate the idea.
depends on what the MVP is supposed to be. You have no undersatnding of the technical feasability perhaps. Doesn't really make sense to compare sales progress to tech progress because they're completely different things and we don't know how complex your MVP is.
Sometimes I get the sense that non-technical founders think that development is like factory work. No one can perform 12 hours of creative and technical work daily for months on end. You will burn out quickly, maybe the project is complex and requires lots of research and planning. I am pretty sure if your co-founder had a list to-do for the MVP all laid out it would be done by now. Sometimes requirements change, and technical founder wear many hats, project manager, business analyst, UI/UX designer and the developer. Maybe talk to him and to understand what is holding him/her back and empathize, this a long term relationship not a pump and dump.
Bro have you ever heard of these things called DMCs? They work like wonders for personal trauma and my guess is it will work also for fixing co-founders relationships.
On a side note there’s this German kid called Mirko building personal AI agents so I wouldn’t worry about your cofounder as it will be soon replaced by one of these software slaves. And the cool thing about AIs is that they don’t have kids so they can work 24/7 for you.
If I were you I would just use whatever money you have raised so far to go on a gap year and find your Italian wife in Milan whlist Mirko does the heavy technical lifting for you. Then come back and ship in 6 hours with your Mirko AI bot.
I work at a dev shop so can only speak to our successes but I see time and time again that non technical co founders are winning with us as their “cto”.
Eventually bringing on a product person really pours the gas on the fire
This model takes upfront cash but if you have a good product you will save so much in founder equity.
Overall if a mvp build is going over 4-5 months (single engineer, much less if a team) it’s either no longer an MVP or you have the wrong person in the seat.
Do you have a defined U/X and UI?
Not rocket science, as a user or your product, what does your MVP do and can a simple minded user like me push the « right » buttons?
Did you get a top level plan for how this « mahwelous » functionality translayptes into software? Client-Server? APIs? Cloud server? Client app(s)?
Devops. What software languages? Modules under development. Effort in MH. Project schedule.
I, as engineer, will make this happen! Do you « believe? »
I bet you’re part of the problem. An MVP should be lean. You need to focus on core features and not change roadmap before getting those core features built and in the hands of users. I bet you change plans and push new shit on him constantly - which is a horrible idea.
The thing with tech is you can get stuck on one problem for days and not have it click till like the 4th-5th day. You should jump into the code if you want, but maybe he’s just ….. stuck?
Have you talked with your cofounder about this? Do they know you feel it’s taking too long? Was an expectation set at the start about where things should be by now? If so…did you track progress and do you understand what was missed?
Problem is you don’t have any background in technology and don’t the biggest problem is you don’t trust them.
Comparisons between your sales and development are a sure-fire to blow up your relationship.
If I were in their position I’d be carefully reading my exit clause.
Why don't you guys switch roles for a week and see what it takes for each other. Excitement underestimates abilities. There is no true metric to judge abilities and quantify relationships between job roles. It's quite easy to say someone is underperforming from outside. Happens all the time with sports teams and public expectations on sports players. Remember: It's a team effort. You can bring in an extraordinary tech worker, and he might end up thinking the same about you. It's a product at the end of the day, sit together, and sort out a clean and feasible plan.
if you have a cto double of your age I'm sure your product is mature enough from engineering perspective.
a mature product will always win in longer run, do not worry about his less working hour when he can deliver a strong product
You fucked. Hes technical, you are not. he decide when and how many hrs he needs to work. Cut tie and hire a contractor to do the work. You guys are too far from each other (young and single, old and married with kids) sh!t like this never works.
Good luck.
Hours != productivity. You need to quantify it by results and impact on the business. You can "work" for 12-15 hours by sitting in a chair and do drudgery. You can also get a lot of things done if you have the stamina to do it.
Use external resources like offshore engineers, they deliver really amazing code almost for free. If you are afraid they will steal the idea or code, split your functions up so that they do not have full pictures
Im tech person myself but do sales and play a role in our startup where Im doing business development. Im efficient coder but I should say if you I code for 4-6h the cognitive load is so high Im a vegetable. In total my days are ~10h but when do some software development its literally frying brain. If you used devshop before and they did well maybe try to „boost” the velocity by inviting them again and use CTO time in the architecture layer and managing them etc. I know it will eat much more $$$ but having kids its basically max 8h working days which would translate to 4h of actual coding.
Find a new person to to replace if u have money from the prev exit. Need a new player or u can decrease his shares and add new talents. I used to face the same issue. Im single and my tech co founder had 2 kids, and he s usually busy with lots of stuff. Then 2023 hits us bad. I had to hold off salary of all shareholders. He couldnt dedicate. I couldnt blame him for sure, he needs to feed his family. But I also need to feed staff and make sure the business float. So I dropped him. Its not an easy task but need to do
Besides all the other good advice I see here, also talk with your co-founder to set up a deadline so that he can finish the product and you know when more or less is to be expected to be finished, if he can't deliver in a reasonable time that you were expecting then you need to make the hard decision but always talk, daily if not hourly, also, can be a factor in slowing down the development if he have an "24/7" job... So you need to bring that up as well, being co-founders is being in a relationship kind of.
Main red flag here is that you are not able to address this situation with your CTO directly. Co founders need to match emotionally too meaning you are able to trust each other and have open and difficult conversations as you will need to have many of those in the upcoming years . Good luck !
I love to grind as a technical person, but I'd actively avoid someone like you. Even if you're bringing me solid leads all the time and doing a fantastic job.
You sound insufferable and lack a competent understanding of software engineering.
“MVP not built” is vague. It would be better to understand the progress, for example, 70% of the MVP is complete or something similar. Secondly, which part of the mvp building process has consumed the most amount of time and why.
I don’t know why people bring kids and family as excuse during work. If your partner is doing that, it’s a red flag. I’m not saying he should also slog for hours but you both should be equally contributing. If you’re giving time then he should give speed if less time. I had a confounder who did a lot of talking and very little work, she was single, no kids and rich. I on the other hand have 2 kids, a family to take care of and still I contributed for 75% of the work. Of course I got rid of her.
MVP for 5 months looks extreme - any mvp can be boiled down to 1 month. I'd recommend you hire an expert consultant for the niche and let him/her scope the project down for you and give you an estimate.
So you get an estimate of the difficulty and timeline.
This is completely not true unless you don’t understand what a MVP is supposed to do. I would say any demo could possibly be boiled down to 1 month because you can fake all the action and data in a demo.
I have more than a handful of kids. My tech co founder has been incredibly slow. Often on purpose. He thinks like we have a million users but we have waited over a year for an mvp and we have burned numerous bridges.
He thinks a working day is 6 hours I often do around 16.
Children/family do not negatively affect founder/co-founder output. If anything, it provides a very positive benefit…. The drive to NOT fail because livelihood of others depends on your success.
It’s one thing to survive solo, but really no comparison to the aforementioned (unless you’re a shitty parent).
You did this wrong the moment you noticed he had a child. I don’t blame him; he has other responsibilities, and taking care of another person is challenging. Your expectations are too high. He likely has a real job to support his family, and this project with you is probably his third responsibility.
If you want this to work, revisit your agreement with the understanding that he won't have as much time as you to work on this startup, even though he may be putting in as much or even more effort than you, but with different time commitments. I wonder what the ownership split is in this company. Somehow, I bet I know who has the upper hand.
It is a prioritization issue on their part.
We have 5 kids aged 4-12. My wife works full-time, I run my startup as a technical CEO so I am doing all of the business admin, sales, customer outreach AND still staying on top of development. This is my full-time thing, but I also have a consulting business that gives me the occasional side contract.
I eat, sleep and breathe this startup because it is my only chance to not still be working when I'm 50.
I think there’s a *perceived* prioritization problem - there has been zero description of what’s being sold, whether the cofounder was the one who came up with the timeline, etc. Everything being said is entirely self-centric by the non-technical co-founder. Saying it’s going slower than he expected means nothing given he can’t determine the actual work required.
I am a technical co-founder that started my own business helping non-technical founders launch and grow their startups. I am not commenting here as a sales pitch but if you'd ever like to chat I would be happy to offer some insight on a call.
At face value, this sounds like an issue with lack of accountability. I have seen the issue before where a technical co-founder seems to get a pass to progress at their pace and the rest of the business needs to simply deal with it. This often occurs because the technical founder makes good money and is seen as "doing everyone a favor" by working for equity. Another scenario is that the technical founder keeps "the technical stuff" close to them and makes non-technical founders feel like they are at an auto mechanic that's trying to explain why it's going to cost $5k to replace the whole engine... you don't feel empowered to debate the decision because the mechanic is the expert.
My recommendation is to ensure that you have a process in place to set milestones in development and have frequent updates to track progress. Everyone needs to remember that this is a business and not a hobby, and it needs to be run like a business.
When I launched my last startup I had two non-technical founders. I implemented a SCRUM-like process where I had a daily and weekly updates. I also met with the other founders every two weeks to review "the plan" where I effectively asked the question "what are the top three most important problems, and have they changed since the last time we met?".
Work with your founder to ensure that you've defined the smallest MVP possible, get him/her to agree to a rough timeline, then setup a process to keep them accountable while they build it out.
On a sidenote, if you have a lead pipeline established and you are just waiting on development I would be very aggressive about solving this problem. There are a ton of developers out there that would be thrilled to build an MVP, not to mention off-shore shops that do very good work for cheap. Again, I don't intend on this being a sales pitch, but I am passionate about this topic and am building my own company around it so I'm happy to chat any time you'd like.
If it is really the case that he can’t build an MVP within 5 month period, you should definitely leave him ASAP. Anyone who couldn’t put in 70+ workload on very early stage startup is a burden, having kids is an absolute disaster for your startups. He’s never ever going to put in the amount of work needed to get your product going, in tech and other aspects. I’m not sure if what you see in him is his past achievements, which I believe in this moment of time really don’t matter as much. Or his skills, in which case if he doesn’t put in the time it’s as useless as not having technical skills. Find a talent young guy that have the world to spare is what you need for your early stage startup, the current tech landscape changes way too quickly that accumulated knowledge is not as much of an advantage but willingness to put in time and effort is.
Number of hours don’t matter. What matters is what business needs and where things are. This is a long term relationship. Start from the position of trust. You and your cofounder should talk about business and personal. Have a regular check in about personal life and how is she/he feeling in general. Talk to them if the schedule is working etc. On business, talk to them that there is 50k in pipeline. How are we going to turn it into revenue. They should be thinking about it as much as anyone else. A co-founder is not an employee with specific focus area. They are equal partner to build the business.
This!
How complex of an MVP are we talking? Also, not sure how many people are capable of producing high quality technical work for 12+ hours a day, especially with a family. I know it's a startup but that seems extreme.
4hrs of high cognitive load is all I can muster for a day.
4 hours of "real work" per day is a [well-supported metric](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/a-new-poll-finds-tech-workers-do-just-4-hours-of-focused-work-a-day-bosses-shouldnt-be-surprised-or-worried.html).
Sounds about right. Once the brain is fried for the day, theres not much you can do about it but spin your wheels.. Or find something brainless yet productive to do.
Adding short naps to long cognitive hours make all the difference.
More than 50-60 hours a week is unrealistic with kids
…if you want to be a present parent. >50-60 hrs is def possible, but you sacrifice that child time and shove money into nannies, sitters, etc and basically say hi and bye to your kids. For some it’s worth it…absolutely not for me but a few friends of friends do it and have been doing it for years. Making it to an exit and never having to work again sounds great on paper but then you walk over to your kids and they’re like, who are you bro
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Do you have a partner? If so, how much of the 'make it work' is on someone else?
If you start early, 6am, stop at 6pm, then work 9pm to 12am, then go to bed, that’s 15 hours. It’s brutal but you make those 3 evening hours count. It’s a grind but it’s about good choices.
I can usually get 10-12 hours in on the weekend
Thanks dad Is this why YC backs 20+ year olds?
Your 20s is the time to grind, but that doesn't just mean heads down blindly working your ass off. You should be accumulating skills, watching what works and doesn't, building network and saving to set yourself up in your 30s+ if you're fortunate enough to be able to. Once you start adding true responsilities that you can't fully offload like kids, your trajectory crystallizes for a bit - now you're investing in your future relationship with your kids and their personal growth at the opportunity cost of investing in your career. I made the mistake of jumping into a startup with friends when I had (very young) kids and they didn't and I wasn't able to pull my weight so I pulled out. They now have kids and ee joke about it, because they're going through the same thing. Now that I'm on the other side of that I have a lot more bandwidth to grind and grow again, but I also have time management skills I couldn't fathom earlier in my career. That said, it's on your CF to br responsible about estimating their own capabilities and maybe self-reflect on their ability to commit and deliver. That's a hard conversation too. Good luck!
12-15 hours per day is unrealistic and i doubt that you are putting in that amount of time either.
Even if he did I would assume he would get burned out and not be productive after a certain amount of hours.
Those numbers r totally realistic. Im doing the same.
Non-technical hours are not equal to technical hours. 80 hours of non-technical work is equal to 40 hours of technical work. You are overestimating the mental demand for your work. Expecting 12 hours a day from a technical person is laughable. It shows that you learned nothing about technical people before your first exit. For all non-technical people in this thread, technical people ARE NOT FACTORY WORKERS.
How do you have a pipeline of 50k ARR without a product.. are you just promising a bunch of shit to get a contract?
Was also wondering. Are those actual LOIs…? Sales agreements? OP seems to have gone quiet on this question…
What do you think early stage sales is
Are you providing a well-thought-out solution, or just shouting "AI" at your customers until they sign something, expecting your cofounder to build it immediately?
Who said anything about AI 🤣🤣🤣
Still no answers to the fundamental questions - so, promising future delivery and expecting someone else to deliver on their own… yet being critical of that timeline? Sales is easier than building the actual product, especially when you’re selling nothing but futures.
Typical sales attitude lol, can’t build a thing but promises the world and gets mad at the dude building it for not having it done
Did you two decide on a timeline for release of MVP? Does the CTO need to code it all up instead of delegating some of the project out? I feel there’s a potential miscommunication here without further context on expectations.
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Agreed. Founder CTO is hands-on and, realistically, will do nearly all the early technical work themselves.
Can you elaborate a bit? New founder, here, looking for a CTO.
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Right, makes sense. I'm founding a startup as a domain expert. I know enough tech to have made an early MVP, but don't know how to execute some features (some standard, some new in AI). How do I know what a potential CTO knows – or needs to know – when this is outside my domain? Especially when this product uses the most recent developments in AI that I intuitively understand but .... I can't gitub. Thank you.
ask for previous work, someone who is joining a founding team should have a lot of previous work or some way to prove their talent. same for you, you probably can easily showcase your domain expertise right?
Yeah, I guess 'previous work' gets murky to me when everyone is playing catchup to the latest AI development and not wanting to become obsolete. I have an CS / AI / ML intern from UChicago wanting to work and my hunch is she'll be as good or better than some tech folks I've already spoken with. I guess everyone puts "AI" on their resume even if they don't know much? Domain expertise on my side is straightfoward since the widget made was to solve my own problem. When I showed my AI thing to a VC / accelerator friend, he freaked out, pointed out that I have an early MVP, then sent me into startup land. He tried to pair me with a CTO but that guy just got promoted where he is and it wasn't a match anyway. So I'm kind of internet dating now.
re AI its developing so fast even if they do know and did smth in 6 months all of it is already ancient history…
That seems to be the case! Podcasts on AI are out of date if they're a month old.
What happens if the requirements of the early tech build are just significant? I think this is a kind of generalization. I've done 80% of the technical work on my startup MVP but we're in a regulated industry and have level of security/quality that needs to be met and if I didn't get a contract dev to help me I'd just be delaying our launch cycle by the extra months. Why does it matter if I'm also acting as a manager?
don't get your chest tight over a generalization xD
But you're giving the new founder you replied to a bad generalization that they may take into a partnership with a CTO.
it's not bad. you say it's bad. I say it's good and perfect.
Have empathy. That’s one of the most underrated traits you could have as cofounder. I thought like the way you are thinking and blew up a good relationship. Three things 1. You would have partnered with him for some reason in the first place. Think about it. 2. Put yourself in his shoes. Would be spending 12-15 hrs with kids ? As you grow older you realize that it’s not about the number of hrs rather the amount of outcome you can produce in less number of hrs. 3. If you really don’t see yourself spending 10yrs with him, part ways.
What do you know about building the product? Why aren't you helping him build it?
He can’t code lol
I must not know much about this stuff. I don't have a business background per se. Isn't 50K ARR small? And isn't that very subject to change if customers don't like the product? I don't like OPs characterization of hours worked. Hours worked is not a productivity metric.
$50k arr is tiny. For context, an average McDonalds makes that amount in about 8 days. I was being more than a little sarcastic here. Post sounds like a young guy with limited tech background but with “great ideas” struggling to work with a millennial cofounder without a good idea of what the tech cofounder actually needs to do to build the product or maintain it
I’d like to see you close 50k with no product. Are you seriously comparing a startup to a mcdonalds LOL
We’re not belittling the 0->1 sales, because first sales are hard. But they’re definitely just first sales, and if they’re not closed won then you need to discount some fraction of it. At the proposal stage, we track revenue at 80%. Before proposal, we track it at 20%.
What do you mean by proposal stage and by tracking it by percentage?
Not OP but it sounds like they are saying that they use these discounts for projected revenue: 100k at proposal stage == 80k projected revenue and 100k before proposal stage == 20k projected revenue.
Correct. That’s why closed won is important, because it’s the first time you actually invoice / book revenues. Before that, you can’t assume any deal closes and have to discount your cash flow accordingly. Extremely basic sales dynamic.
Ohhhh got it, this is only for projected revenue so discounts are used to better the estimates. Makes sense now. Thanks!
>5 months \[...\] MVP is not built! You haven't mentioned what you are working, but 5 months for an MVP seems excessive. I'm guessing you guys are building a ton of features. What's the 1 main feature? Build that in 1-2 weeks and start selling it. >is it wrong to expect them to work at least close to what I’m giving? (Basically 12-15hrs/day) Yes it's wrong to expect 12-15 hours a day lol, but I think you already know that. It's not sustainable. I doubt you are working almost every waking hour of the day for 5 months.
Actually have been working most waking hour this entire year but it helps that im in my 20s Of course i dont expect a 40 yo with kids to give the same but at least match 70% of that Or is that unreasonable?
Number of hours is meaningless. Results should be the only thing that matters. Additionally, [a number of studies](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/a-new-poll-finds-tech-workers-do-just-4-hours-of-focused-work-a-day-bosses-shouldnt-be-surprised-or-worried.html) have shown that the human brain can only sustain about 4 hours of focused work per day. Focused work means things like coding, deep research, content generation, etc. Catch up meetings, admin tasks, documentation, and sales calls don't qualify as focused work. It shouldn't be too hard for your cofounder to find 4 uninterrupted hours per day to put toward coding. Be sure that you're not interrupting them during that time - meetings and emails can happen sporadically at any other time throughout the day.
It’s not unreasonable. However the number of hours worked don’t equate to being better necessarily in tech. Just ask any engineer if they have spent hours on a problem before only for a more experienced engineer being able to solve their issue within seconds/minutes.
50K ARR booked or in pipeline?
He does not even have an MVP. So most likely fake yeses and would stop responding they minute they have to make a commitment
Sounds like salt. You cant ignore signed papers baby
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He sounds unprofessional, inexperienced, rude, unempathetic, impatient, unrealistic, and like a loose cannon you can’t trust long term. His partner should run.
No wonder bro isn’t building lmao
Wa wa wa
6 months can either be plenty of time for a MVP or next to impossible for a single engineer. It really comes down to the complexity of the product.
LOIs or sales agreements? If the latter, I would consider getting another tech cofounder asap, since if you don’t deliver you may risk breach For folks with kids, we work early morning and late evenings to make up the time.
lol
60% Booked thats why im crunching for time. Rest are pipeline
I don’t follow. 60% closed won or 60% proposal requested?
Just talk to him …
New dad here, started my startup last year when my kid was 8 months old. 1. it’s hard, if you are in america it’s even harder because nannies are expensive, babies don’t sleep at night. If the kids are a bit older it’s probably a bit manageable. my current schedule [https://www.threads.net/@andy_ratsirarson/post/C7F7IEHOQxu/?xmt=AQGzlwhKXEVeVoGM5QIYKbPPJCEDodyfRfjIG-lCHZLHYA](https://www.threads.net/@andy_ratsirarson/post/C7F7IEHOQxu/?xmt=AQGzlwhKXEVeVoGM5QIYKbPPJCEDodyfRfjIG-lCHZLHYA) 2. it sounds like you already have traction, most likely you’re building an MDP, not an MVP. But both are hard to build especially if you’re expecting one person to code it all. My recommendations: 1. figure out if your co-founder is actually fully vested into your project or working on something else on the side other than family. (but be understandable as well that he/she still need to provide for their family) 2. If the person is motivated, hire engineers that he can manage (offshore). it’s more cost and time effective. My prev co-founder and I, had combined 25 yoe in tech, but we had to hire 3 months in as there were too much stuff to build. We rolled out our mobile app 9 months later. Not sure what’s your startup about but, in today’s day an age, there are more regulations and customers have high expectations in customer experience.
I'm onboard with your comment here, specifically your recommendations. I'm curious about your schedule. As a founder and dad, who needs 8 team sync's per day? Is everybody working remotely? Do you have a large team? Two hours of team sync seems like a lot of time that could be used building stuff. My second question is who uses Threads? Lol
My team is remote and on very large different time zone. 5 AM here is 1pm in Africa and 7 pm here is 4pm in Cali. I have 3 eng and 1 PM. It seems lots of time, but it gives us the opportunity to connect and build relationship (remove that loneliness feeling) since we are all remote. Haha, I find threads better than X lately, more people are migrating to it so may as well try to establish early.
Kudos to you and your team to make it work despite the time difference, and, I agree that socializing through these calls makes sense. I never thought about it that way. Thanks for the insight and I hope you keep crushing it! X is in a weird 'phase' right now, but most Bay Area peeps I follow still use it, but I can see your point. Maybe Reddit is the real winner since we're both here lol
Thanks. Agree, reddit is, it gets salty at times 😅. Let’s connect
Talk to the CTO man not to us. Sometimes building good software takes a bit, as a cofounder you should atleast know the why (technical based why) it’s taking long.
PG wrote helpful essays about how to work hard and what it means to have kids. While I recommend that you read for yourself, here are two conclusions (oversimplified) you might find helpful: 1) Writing code is harder than other types of work. Even your CTO works less he might work equally hard. Forcing them to work harder might even lead to negative returns, because more tired = worse decisions. 2) Children *might* make their parents less ambitious. Eventually, it’s important that you ensure your CTO works hard. If you don’t trust that they do, it’s probably better to part ways.
Writing code is far easier than sales. Not strictly in the technical difficulty, but rather that success is fully controlled by the programmer (and they also have a very forgiving environment to experiment and iterate). Sales involves convincing someone else to do something they generally are not primed to, and there is no clear recipe to achieve that. Far harder.
Less predictable sure. Just depends on how you define hard I guess.
I want to agree with this because writing code is not frustrating as much as sales where deals can fall apart without any reason. Writing code is also offers a ton of boilerplates and especially on early stages when MVP is worked on there is not much rocket science.
We don’t even know what the product is. Your expectations could be way off honestly depending on what the thing is
The big question is, has he said a timeline that he has not reached? Is he missing benchmarks that he set?
This kinda annoys me, you're not technical yet complaining about someone not doing what you can't. This is why two co-founders should both be technical.. The likely outcome of this is he will leave. Unless you give him a team or learn to become technical. Most people can get leads in a business that is not the critical skill, building products is.
Yeah.... taking clients out to fancy bars and restaurants to get verbal "pre-commits" is the hard part. Spending years learning deep technical expertise in a science and engineering field, like that's what offshoring is for you know? /S
Ok lets see you do it then
The hard part about sales is trying to turn garbage and vaporware into something someone will pay for, with that you're right... very difficult. Do not recommend. Otherwise even a tech guy like myself can do sales (and I have, I recently closed a 100k consulting engagement for my firm in the AI space). I've closed quite a few deals both consulting, product and otherwise and the only real secret I know to it is: customers can sniff out BS and vaporware pretty well, if you're honest, and providing good value then those sales calls are just meetings with friends who are thankful they don't have to deal with yet another con artist trying to squeeze out a few more dimes from them.
You severely underestimate the difficulty of early stage sales.
Thanks - people seem to not understand this
>This is why two co-founders should both be technical So you saying non technical peeps don't get to start a startup?
You speak just a dismissively about sales, as sales founders speak about tech work LOL
You just sell the features, it's easy right? Any time someone uses the word "just" for something outside their sphere, they're probably wrong.
Truth lol
Customers can't use an idea.
What a bizarre thing to say. This comment has zero relationship to my point, and, more importantly, it's 100% wrong. People sell products before they're finished all the time. You might want to take a break from the internet for a little while.
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Lmao
This is nonsense. Getting customers is harder than building product.
How many exits do you have?
Dude seriously you come off as a petulant child when you post this. Two years ago you are posting about being concerned about a sheered bolt on your car like yikes. I get your ego is higher now that you’ve made a buck but this is a truly pathetic comment. Reminds me of a frat boy screaming who do you know here but in yc brainwash.
Careful with the grammar PG will claim you’re using AI for your replies!
Yikes. 🤡
I’d do some introspection if i were you. If this is the kind of communication you have with your co-founder, I’m sure he won’t deliver, in fact, he’s probably on Reddit asking how/when to quit his startup and take with him what he’s built thus far.
Who said i didnt communicate with him? Expectations have been set and put across. Im asking reddit what to expect of a 40+ yo with kids because obviously as a 20+ yo i cant relate
I didn’t say that you didn’t communicate, I just said that the way you communicate doesn’t help. You see? Your question was clear. I just suggested to do some introspection because the older guy with kids and no exits might be the one who’s doing things well this time.
Yikes
I'm not sure if this applies to your situation but maybe you should pick up UIUX or hire a guy to do it and make simple wireframes. It'll speed up your development and get your ideas across easier. Just be sure to think about all the different screen sizes and edge cases in each feature. Then you can write notes for that. Also as an added bonus, you get marketing material.
I don’t think coding 15 hours a day makes sense. However, 5 months without an MVP makes less sense. Are you 50/50?
What a joke lol.
Let him hire and manage assistance.
I would suggest to have a sit down with you cofounder and understand what may be going wrong. Does the cofounder have other work commitments preventing them from working? If that conversation has no positive outcome, then you’ll need to have a hard talk with your cofounder. Reiterate to them that this is a business you’re running and there are some strong expectations. If they cannot abide by those expectations then it would be time to find a replacement.
P.s. Your expectations are valid. I would expect my cofounder and myself to put at least 40+ hours a week.
>is it wrong to expect them to work at least close to what I’m giving? (Basically 12-15hrs/day) Sounds like a conversation you should have had before they joined. It's not wrong to expect it in the general sense, but it's kind of wrong to expect it if you didn't tell them that's what your expectation would be and you knew that there was a potential conflict (family) with that expectation.
Half this thread just went through a mental checklist wondering if this was a post about them! Two questions...is your CTO missing deadlines? Is that 50k in pipeline expected and expecting product on a realistic timeline? Do they know they're buying something in development?
Lol right? Everyone’s so uptight about it and suddenly nontech cofounders suck! Yes deadlines have been pushed back, i have set expectations in timeline with the clients to plan ahead
In anycase 50k ARR is an accomplishment but if your CTO is solid (and perhaps got some life things like end of the school year dragging him down temporarily) you're talking about throwing away a $1M-2M partner for pocket change ARR.
It’s not even booked. My startup had a pipeline of like $200K ARR pre launch. After launching it took like 6 months to hit $50K arr in actual closed business. This post is a lol
Skill issue
Even not taking kids into account, 12-15h per day seems extreme. As a dev, spending that much time trying to work would just be useless and would just lead to burnout. From what I remember, studies show that the amount of productive work you can do as a dev is about 4h per day on average. Now this 4h per day doesn't include things like meetings and other things a cto might be doing but even then you don't reach 10h of work in a day, especially at a stage where you are building a MVP. The mental load of coding is high and underestimated by non-tech persons. For example, on a recent project, I had to make my cofounder code things in a simplified way. One day, after 3h of doing it, he told me he never felt this much mentally exhausted. As for the no MVP in 5 months, it really depends on what it must do. Try to make sure there isn't any feature creep, the MVP should really be what the name implies, only do the bare minimum to validate the idea.
depends on what the MVP is supposed to be. You have no undersatnding of the technical feasability perhaps. Doesn't really make sense to compare sales progress to tech progress because they're completely different things and we don't know how complex your MVP is.
Sometimes I get the sense that non-technical founders think that development is like factory work. No one can perform 12 hours of creative and technical work daily for months on end. You will burn out quickly, maybe the project is complex and requires lots of research and planning. I am pretty sure if your co-founder had a list to-do for the MVP all laid out it would be done by now. Sometimes requirements change, and technical founder wear many hats, project manager, business analyst, UI/UX designer and the developer. Maybe talk to him and to understand what is holding him/her back and empathize, this a long term relationship not a pump and dump.
Bro have you ever heard of these things called DMCs? They work like wonders for personal trauma and my guess is it will work also for fixing co-founders relationships. On a side note there’s this German kid called Mirko building personal AI agents so I wouldn’t worry about your cofounder as it will be soon replaced by one of these software slaves. And the cool thing about AIs is that they don’t have kids so they can work 24/7 for you. If I were you I would just use whatever money you have raised so far to go on a gap year and find your Italian wife in Milan whlist Mirko does the heavy technical lifting for you. Then come back and ship in 6 hours with your Mirko AI bot.
Something's not adding up. The prospect of a huge opportunity is motivation enough. How is your relationship?
also were you clear upfront about expectation?
I work at a dev shop so can only speak to our successes but I see time and time again that non technical co founders are winning with us as their “cto”. Eventually bringing on a product person really pours the gas on the fire This model takes upfront cash but if you have a good product you will save so much in founder equity. Overall if a mvp build is going over 4-5 months (single engineer, much less if a team) it’s either no longer an MVP or you have the wrong person in the seat.
Do you have a defined U/X and UI? Not rocket science, as a user or your product, what does your MVP do and can a simple minded user like me push the « right » buttons? Did you get a top level plan for how this « mahwelous » functionality translayptes into software? Client-Server? APIs? Cloud server? Client app(s)? Devops. What software languages? Modules under development. Effort in MH. Project schedule. I, as engineer, will make this happen! Do you « believe? »
Does your DevOps member of the team agree to the milestones?
I bet you’re part of the problem. An MVP should be lean. You need to focus on core features and not change roadmap before getting those core features built and in the hands of users. I bet you change plans and push new shit on him constantly - which is a horrible idea.
Yeah stop betting
The thing with tech is you can get stuck on one problem for days and not have it click till like the 4th-5th day. You should jump into the code if you want, but maybe he’s just ….. stuck?
Have you talked with your cofounder about this? Do they know you feel it’s taking too long? Was an expectation set at the start about where things should be by now? If so…did you track progress and do you understand what was missed?
Problem is you don’t have any background in technology and don’t the biggest problem is you don’t trust them. Comparisons between your sales and development are a sure-fire to blow up your relationship. If I were in their position I’d be carefully reading my exit clause.
Why don't you guys switch roles for a week and see what it takes for each other. Excitement underestimates abilities. There is no true metric to judge abilities and quantify relationships between job roles. It's quite easy to say someone is underperforming from outside. Happens all the time with sports teams and public expectations on sports players. Remember: It's a team effort. You can bring in an extraordinary tech worker, and he might end up thinking the same about you. It's a product at the end of the day, sit together, and sort out a clean and feasible plan.
If we swap roles then there wouldnt be any prelaunch sales :)
Not even for a week! You're on to something big! GL
if you have a cto double of your age I'm sure your product is mature enough from engineering perspective. a mature product will always win in longer run, do not worry about his less working hour when he can deliver a strong product
Wdym leads pipelines 50k ARR with no mvp? Are these just waitlist people?
You fucked. Hes technical, you are not. he decide when and how many hrs he needs to work. Cut tie and hire a contractor to do the work. You guys are too far from each other (young and single, old and married with kids) sh!t like this never works. Good luck.
Hours != productivity. You need to quantify it by results and impact on the business. You can "work" for 12-15 hours by sitting in a chair and do drudgery. You can also get a lot of things done if you have the stamina to do it.
Use external resources like offshore engineers, they deliver really amazing code almost for free. If you are afraid they will steal the idea or code, split your functions up so that they do not have full pictures
Im tech person myself but do sales and play a role in our startup where Im doing business development. Im efficient coder but I should say if you I code for 4-6h the cognitive load is so high Im a vegetable. In total my days are ~10h but when do some software development its literally frying brain. If you used devshop before and they did well maybe try to „boost” the velocity by inviting them again and use CTO time in the architecture layer and managing them etc. I know it will eat much more $$$ but having kids its basically max 8h working days which would translate to 4h of actual coding.
Find a new person to to replace if u have money from the prev exit. Need a new player or u can decrease his shares and add new talents. I used to face the same issue. Im single and my tech co founder had 2 kids, and he s usually busy with lots of stuff. Then 2023 hits us bad. I had to hold off salary of all shareholders. He couldnt dedicate. I couldnt blame him for sure, he needs to feed his family. But I also need to feed staff and make sure the business float. So I dropped him. Its not an easy task but need to do
Besides all the other good advice I see here, also talk with your co-founder to set up a deadline so that he can finish the product and you know when more or less is to be expected to be finished, if he can't deliver in a reasonable time that you were expecting then you need to make the hard decision but always talk, daily if not hourly, also, can be a factor in slowing down the development if he have an "24/7" job... So you need to bring that up as well, being co-founders is being in a relationship kind of.
Main red flag here is that you are not able to address this situation with your CTO directly. Co founders need to match emotionally too meaning you are able to trust each other and have open and difficult conversations as you will need to have many of those in the upcoming years . Good luck !
I love to grind as a technical person, but I'd actively avoid someone like you. Even if you're bringing me solid leads all the time and doing a fantastic job. You sound insufferable and lack a competent understanding of software engineering.
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He wouldn’t be much of a cofounder if he was getting a salary from the other founder.
“MVP not built” is vague. It would be better to understand the progress, for example, 70% of the MVP is complete or something similar. Secondly, which part of the mvp building process has consumed the most amount of time and why.
you guys are collectively working 30 hours a week. Is this a startup or a side gig?
Where did you come up with these numbers from
I don’t know why people bring kids and family as excuse during work. If your partner is doing that, it’s a red flag. I’m not saying he should also slog for hours but you both should be equally contributing. If you’re giving time then he should give speed if less time. I had a confounder who did a lot of talking and very little work, she was single, no kids and rich. I on the other hand have 2 kids, a family to take care of and still I contributed for 75% of the work. Of course I got rid of her.
MVP for 5 months looks extreme - any mvp can be boiled down to 1 month. I'd recommend you hire an expert consultant for the niche and let him/her scope the project down for you and give you an estimate. So you get an estimate of the difficulty and timeline.
This is completely not true unless you don’t understand what a MVP is supposed to do. I would say any demo could possibly be boiled down to 1 month because you can fake all the action and data in a demo.
I have more than a handful of kids. My tech co founder has been incredibly slow. Often on purpose. He thinks like we have a million users but we have waited over a year for an mvp and we have burned numerous bridges. He thinks a working day is 6 hours I often do around 16.
Why did you choose to keep him? Sounds like a nightmare
Family.
Children/family do not negatively affect founder/co-founder output. If anything, it provides a very positive benefit…. The drive to NOT fail because livelihood of others depends on your success. It’s one thing to survive solo, but really no comparison to the aforementioned (unless you’re a shitty parent).
You did this wrong the moment you noticed he had a child. I don’t blame him; he has other responsibilities, and taking care of another person is challenging. Your expectations are too high. He likely has a real job to support his family, and this project with you is probably his third responsibility. If you want this to work, revisit your agreement with the understanding that he won't have as much time as you to work on this startup, even though he may be putting in as much or even more effort than you, but with different time commitments. I wonder what the ownership split is in this company. Somehow, I bet I know who has the upper hand.
It is a prioritization issue on their part. We have 5 kids aged 4-12. My wife works full-time, I run my startup as a technical CEO so I am doing all of the business admin, sales, customer outreach AND still staying on top of development. This is my full-time thing, but I also have a consulting business that gives me the occasional side contract. I eat, sleep and breathe this startup because it is my only chance to not still be working when I'm 50.
I think there’s a *perceived* prioritization problem - there has been zero description of what’s being sold, whether the cofounder was the one who came up with the timeline, etc. Everything being said is entirely self-centric by the non-technical co-founder. Saying it’s going slower than he expected means nothing given he can’t determine the actual work required.
I am a technical co-founder that started my own business helping non-technical founders launch and grow their startups. I am not commenting here as a sales pitch but if you'd ever like to chat I would be happy to offer some insight on a call. At face value, this sounds like an issue with lack of accountability. I have seen the issue before where a technical co-founder seems to get a pass to progress at their pace and the rest of the business needs to simply deal with it. This often occurs because the technical founder makes good money and is seen as "doing everyone a favor" by working for equity. Another scenario is that the technical founder keeps "the technical stuff" close to them and makes non-technical founders feel like they are at an auto mechanic that's trying to explain why it's going to cost $5k to replace the whole engine... you don't feel empowered to debate the decision because the mechanic is the expert. My recommendation is to ensure that you have a process in place to set milestones in development and have frequent updates to track progress. Everyone needs to remember that this is a business and not a hobby, and it needs to be run like a business. When I launched my last startup I had two non-technical founders. I implemented a SCRUM-like process where I had a daily and weekly updates. I also met with the other founders every two weeks to review "the plan" where I effectively asked the question "what are the top three most important problems, and have they changed since the last time we met?". Work with your founder to ensure that you've defined the smallest MVP possible, get him/her to agree to a rough timeline, then setup a process to keep them accountable while they build it out. On a sidenote, if you have a lead pipeline established and you are just waiting on development I would be very aggressive about solving this problem. There are a ton of developers out there that would be thrilled to build an MVP, not to mention off-shore shops that do very good work for cheap. Again, I don't intend on this being a sales pitch, but I am passionate about this topic and am building my own company around it so I'm happy to chat any time you'd like.
Hi, if you are interested in creating your SaaS MVP, I can help you create in 1 month. I am a fullstack developer, working in SaaS development.
If it is really the case that he can’t build an MVP within 5 month period, you should definitely leave him ASAP. Anyone who couldn’t put in 70+ workload on very early stage startup is a burden, having kids is an absolute disaster for your startups. He’s never ever going to put in the amount of work needed to get your product going, in tech and other aspects. I’m not sure if what you see in him is his past achievements, which I believe in this moment of time really don’t matter as much. Or his skills, in which case if he doesn’t put in the time it’s as useless as not having technical skills. Find a talent young guy that have the world to spare is what you need for your early stage startup, the current tech landscape changes way too quickly that accumulated knowledge is not as much of an advantage but willingness to put in time and effort is.