Confounded
A high energy podcast with its own video channel featuring interviews with amazing people who have overcome adversity and life’s challenges to be successful in unique and wonderful ways.
Confounded
Meet Nelly Yusupova, Founder of TechSpeak.co and CTO of Webgrrls International
Unlock the secrets to transformational project planning and masterful delegation with the digital pioneer behind New York City WebGurls International, who joins us in a riveting conversation. We're diving into the heart of effective task prioritization and how to cultivate a team culture that prizes learning from every outcome. You'll hear tales from the tech trenches that paint a picture of the internet's dramatic evolution, and glean practical advice on breaking down monolithic projects into achievable segments.
Embark on a journey through lean and agile methodologies with us, as we traverse beyond the realm of software development and into the fabric of day-to-day life and strategic business planning. Our guest, a maestro of the Textbeat workshops, lays out a 10-step roadmap for product creation that pivots on customer feedback and prototyping, sidelining coding to a later stage. We'll discuss the metamorphosis of the CTO role from hands-on coder to visionary leader and uncover strategies for startups to streamline product development, avoiding the snares of excessive complexity.
As we bid farewell to our enlightening session, we marvel at the transformation of TechSuite for Entrepreneurs, which has burgeoned from a local bootcamp to a global online beacon of innovation during the pandemic's upheaval. This episode is a veritable toolkit for entrepreneurs aiming to sidestep common tech industry blunders and propel their ventures forward. Tune in for insights that promise to sharpen your entrepreneurial acumen and equip you with the wisdom to chart a course through the dynamic waters of technology.
So hi, Welcome to Confounded TV. How are you?
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have our conversation today.
Speaker 1:I'm super excited. I have some show notes here, whichever you can read down below on YouTube or they'll be on Spotify. This is amazing, this career. I think you were on the internet in 1995 and you founded New York City WebGurls International, which started with six women in New York City in 1995 and now has a hundred chapters, of which you're the leader of the New York chapter, and 30,000 members. Not only that, you're the founder of Textbeat for Entrepreneurs, which I love because you do workshops to help founders understand, if they're non-technical, how to deal with their technology teams and their projects. And then not only that, you do the workshops and the seminar teaching and you do blogging. And also you've been featured as a tech expert in Ink Magazine, nbc's day show, fast County Magazine, newsiecom, o'reilly, smart Money, small Biz and Tech Republic's Woman's Radio. That sounds like a lot of work.
Speaker 2:Keeps me busy.
Speaker 1:Before we came on you were talking about. It's actually a lot of this is about delegation and planning of time.
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm very, very mindful about how I structure my days. I have number one, the top three things that have to get done in a day that are the most important. That could be blockers for other people on my team, and so I am very intentional on getting those done first, before the rest of the madness happens for the day. And then the other thing that is really important, as we talked about, is delegating and trusting your team to actually make decisions for you. We have a culture of learn early, learn often learn cheap In the early startup philosophy.
Speaker 2:it's fail early fail often fail cheap. I kind of flip that around a little bit, because I feel like we are reframing failure every day as a learning opportunity. So it's really important for us to set mindset and be okay with it. And so we just earlier talked about how is it that you can trust a team member to be able to run with it. Just let go. Yes, Just let go with it. And it's because, just like in lean philosophy, we work on projects and we try to take these big, large, giant projects and break them into smaller pieces. So if something doesn't work out, it's not a big deal.
Speaker 2:We didn't lose a lot of time, we didn't lose a lot of energy or it doesn't cost us too much. So, from one aspect of things, people know that because we're learning early and often it's okay to put things to not work, out, you can relax.
Speaker 1:You can lean into it and relax Exactly.
Speaker 2:You can lean into it because there's learning on the other side.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And so people feel empowered with that and I never recommend somebody. If somebody made a mistake, the question is always what did we learn from it?
Speaker 1:Unless they buy, the wrong biscuits right, because that's just fundamentally wrong. If you don't buy the milk chocolate digested biscuits in Britain, you've got no chance. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because I did a bit of consulting for big companies and those grand projeces are dangerous. I had the six month cycle to get something delivered. I've never seen one actually work. And what you're saying is that little iterative changes to something is a lot easier, it's cheaper. If you make a mistake you move on, and also it isn't really a mistake. If you do these little iterative things, it's like experiment and oh, that is good and that's bad. It's hard to sort of fail in the smaller iterative pieces of work, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It's so true because I think, when you bring it down to decision making on a daily basis, we have to make thousands of different decisions, and some of them are really, really complex and you can be paralyzed trying to make a good decision. But what is a good decision? A good decision is one that's made really fast, and so when you take the fail early fail often fail cheap approach or learn early often learn cheap approach, then you can actually, by breaking the project into smaller pieces and using this iterative approach, you can actually, with every single failure or learning opportunity, you're actually getting more data to inform you on whether you're headed in the right direction, so you never feel stress about the decision that you're making. That's actually a positive thing, because all along the way, you're learning new things, and then you let data and what you're learning inform the next thing that you're going to do.
Speaker 1:Okay, I guess the analogy can be like I'm going to move house, You're not going to go, I'm going to move house and that's it. Right Decision made, you tend to go, where would I live and how much would this house be worth, and how we're going to get a mortgage, and there's probably a lot of decisions to make before you actually go. Okay and jump, and you see that with software Devon this will come back to this, like the qualities of the CTO and the learnings you've got to share there and this course for the, for the technical people, things are naturally broken down into into smaller chunks, because you don't just sit down and like write one big block of Java or C sharp or whatever to build an application. You work at all the different pieces and you wouldn't. So for technically that's easier. Whereas I found a specific, an idea to founder just because I've got an idea and raises some money, they just see the end.
Speaker 2:Right, well, that's, I'm going to correct you a little bit there with.
Speaker 1:That's what you're here for.
Speaker 2:I don't know anything about with the developers mindset. Yes, the way that we think is very logical. Because I'm a developer, I know exactly how developers think it's very logical. You can take this big problem and you can break it down into smaller chunks so you can solve it right, because the smaller problem is much easier to solve than one bigger problem. But when it comes to process and working in smaller chunks and iterating that way, developers are not actually trained to think that way. Okay, in fact, developers are not process oriented at all. All they want to do is write code. They want to solve their problem and they want to play in their sandbox rather than try to figure out is this good for the customer? Is this feature going to make move the needle forward from a business perspective?
Speaker 2:And so that's why it's such an important thing for founders to understand developers and understand how to communicate that aspect of the business side the customer side to the developer.
Speaker 1:It's hard, it's really hard.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's really hard, and if you don't know how to do it properly, you're never going to be able to build an efficient product that does exactly what you want and that customers will love.
Speaker 1:Because it's the customer, right. So you're building a booking engine for COVID free pubs, right and you've never been in a pub and you don't go to the pub and you don't really know the first rules of COVID. I'll write the software because that's going to solve their problem, and you go and see them. The problem isn't actually that bit of it. The problem is something over here and then and you can build. We now did this with Kars and we built stuff that we thought this is a really good idea. The current dealers couldn't have cared less. Exactly, if you just asked first and then tried to build a little bit of that, you would have gone step, step, step, step and built something better. So, something that we did work really well and something didn't at all.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and sometimes when you plan this big project, you can we iterate in small releases, right? So the release that you're working on right now is set this is an agile development is set and cannot be changed, but everything else can be moved around.
Speaker 1:So the feature that you thought might be really, really important, that's in your project roadmap, can be moved, because as you release something to the customers, they're so they go really crazy about that and you realize that the next thing you need to build is something that you didn't even think about, or something that you plan for much later, and so this gives you a lot of flexibility in how you service the customer, and do it based on what you learn, which is why it's not even just technology, though, is it Because, like Airbnb, was ticking along nicely and then took better quality photographs and then hit, that was the rocket ship, and it was actually just we'll just test better photographs. We think that's a problem. And then it ended up being oh, actually, we need a global network of photographers, but they did it, but, funny enough, you bring that as a use case.
Speaker 2:they actually did use the lean methodologies to test out the concept. So instead of rolling out, they had a hunch that by putting yeah, they did it themselves in there. Yeah, they did. They did it themselves for a month and they figured out all the issues around it and they actually tested to see if bookings would go up. Yeah, but they ran the experiment and it worked. I think it was at least double or triple inefficiency.
Speaker 1:Oh, it was amazing yeah.
Speaker 2:And then they rolled out to the rest of the company. But if you start to think that way, it's not just. It's not a process. Lean and agile thinking is not a process just for software development.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's if the process for the way that I personally live my life right it's the way that I run teens, it's the way that I run marketing and sales and business development Figure out a way to take a bigger project and break into smaller pieces and figure out what experiment can I set up to see if I'm headed in the right direction.
Speaker 1:It was really quite hard though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're minimizing your mistakes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is why your seminars are really interesting and the course you run right, because you could certainly argue. I think the last time I built a website was 2000 and something later than you were on the internet, but it's a start and I built my first one. I learned my SQL, put a couple of million records in, built a search into the top and all that great stuff. So, no, completely not techie, but you're 100% right because I would go this is the thing, let's build this thing, and actually it's a real struggle to roll that back into one of the tests that validate the first step on that journey, not even like much. Forget the stuff further down. Will people do X test?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's actually really In my process. Writing code is step number eight. Wow, so we've got the 10 step process. There's seven steps that you do before step number eight.
Speaker 1:Tell us what are the 10 steps. I've got you there. Okay, all 10 steps. Let's go Number one.
Speaker 2:So the first one is you validate right, yeah, so we talked about how we fall in love with our idea and the more we think about.
Speaker 1:The better again.
Speaker 2:The more you fall in love with it. The more you work on it, the more you fall in love with it, because on the flip side, you are thinking about All the investment that you've made in it already and you don't want to admit right in your head. That you don't want to also admit that this could be headed in the wrong direction. So you kind of have to separate yourself from how good your idea is and Create a almost big it like a scientific experiment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really hard, because ideas are much more fun.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. In the validate stage, you don't want to even think about writing code. The idea is to try to figure out whether it's a brand new feature or a brand new product. Right, it doesn't have to be like every single idea that I work with has to go through this validation process. Yeah, and so the key there is to refine it so that it's Whatever you often think. The way that it should be built or the way that you're thinking about it is not necessarily a hundred percent the way that the rest of the population thinks about it, right? So the goal is to find and make sure that it's a level 10 and 11 problem. So the first step is to validate. The second step is to prototype. Yeah, and over not writing code. The prototyping is building an interactive version of your Project, right, a possible solution, and you're not writing code. You're creating this interactive Product that can be loaded on your mobile device or tablet, and then you can show it to customers and Validate for their weather.
Speaker 1:Solution right excitement level as they go Exactly or a figure out how to refine the usability issues right.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you put the buttons in the wrong place or it's it's totally Confusing to users. With one of my clients, we we did this, it's we got it right on the third time. So the first time would show it to. Our solution to a customer is and they were like no, totally got it wrong. Second time we got there about 50% of the time and then the third time we already it started resonating. People asked us further questions, so we we knew that we can move forward momentum going there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you must find. You must find the internet, like you know, thiefly frustrating. I see stuff when you click through and then on your phone, if you need to scroll up and it loses the bottom, the top doesn't work. You know who does this and this isn't like you know. You know there's somebody in a garage knocking together an app. This is expensive. You know very big businesses and you're like how can you pass this on an average iPhone 11? I can't log out because the logout buttons hidden behind the scroll thing Right. So use the internet for that. You must try you and say I See this all the time.
Speaker 2:It's because it's it's what I do. Every day. I notice these things, and the reason why that often happens is and this is really important to know if you want to build an app or if you're thinking of one, is the maintenance part of it. So you build, your first version could be on a totally different iPhone version, and then every single Release, the iPhone can change, and so you are responsible for maintaining this thing that you built on all of the devices. So oftentimes, if the phone that you're using or the device that you're using is not the exact dimensions that you built the original app for and you didn't make any modifications, that's when you can start to see those type of problems. So, yeah, it's a big commitment because you have to maintain it on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:I know we should go to number three, but I just I have to have to go back in time because there's not many, as of Many of us have been knocking around the internet since pre 2000 not, not really, there's a lot of. You'll say they were, but really they just had a job and somebody gave them a computer. So, like 95 I'm thinking back here and thinking, okay, 98 I think it was I quit my job in London and then got the train home and that was it. I had no job. I just couldn't work in the city and do button pressing for no reason. And then I Went, and not some every door in the town, and I lived in and said would you like a website? I can build these websites. And they were like what for like? And Literally not every single business door in this town of about 50,000 people. And so I would said no, and the one guy said yes, and we ended up in business for something 12, 13, maybe even bit longer years in 95.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to think back that's Priyahu probably is there, or just so in 95 the web was not what we know it as now a very interactive. It was pretty much Just a web page with text.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm shining tiny gifts, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was no places really and links there was no. Maybe images also, but no videos. No, no way to comment or like or interact with anything or order online.
Speaker 1:It was very, very flat before that, yeah it was a sort of library of some weird and mostly men collecting Pictures of stuff that was really boring, like there's a tractor wheel from a Ford there, whatever. Because I'm fascinated how you sat in 95 and then sort of 60 got together and said not only is this internet thing really Fascinating and we see there's a future in this, but you also founded, you know, like web girls. Was it called web girls back then?
Speaker 2:So I actually didn't found web girls, so I joined them in 97. So they started in 95. I joined them in 97, but the origin story was these six women met, funny enough, in an internet cafe, obviously New York City, and they started talking about this thing called the internet and how fun it was. And they didn't nobody knew where it was gonna go, but it was intriguing enough that they said oh, we should meet.
Speaker 2:This was so much fun, let's meet again next month and invite some friends and you know people did, and so it went from 6 to 30 to then 50 and it just blew up.
Speaker 1:But I mean, how did it? It blew up back then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it blew up because people, people got really excited about the possibilities of it.
Speaker 1:I mean it could just be. The UK was a few years behind, so my 95 is very different to you. You've already had a high speed internet and you know the stuff was coming out of the west coast. It would excite everyone right where we were over here going oh, you know, does it permit tractor? You know I've got a terrible accent now I'm gonna get a lot of trouble for that one Um and so like. But in my in 97, then you knew, came into it. This is the days of the static web page, web page with the blinking gifts.
Speaker 2:Yes, seven. We already had a community that we build online town hall. Yes, it was. It had chats and communications and all that it was. Now that I look back at it, it was so innovative to be able to get that kind of stuff. It was all running in a web browser. It was awesome. It's the the community that was Offered to you.
Speaker 1:I have a question for you. Here's a trick question. We talked now about the number the iPhone's changing, but you, like me, must remember like internet Explorer, versus trying what it was at the time and next, keep navigator.
Speaker 2:That gave yes, and then I'm gonna explore.
Speaker 1:And then Elvis and internet for a weird run weird run, harder and harder. And to the time it got to internet Explorer six, I think at that point I gave up actually said Salta, if you've got internet for six, you're just gonna have to put up with the site breaking because it was getting expensive Right the mouth of the saying now right, Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I mean now, if you're a business and you have an app, you probably need to have a web version of it as well, depending on what you're doing, Just like, for example, if you think about Twitter. They have a web app, they have a mobile app, which is an iOS device, and an Android device. They I don't know if they support Windows. They probably do, because they have a big graph team.
Speaker 2:That's already four things More different types of development teams that you have to have and support the infrastructure of and the development languages. The programming languages are different for all different platforms so you can't even have one development team work on all of the different platforms you have to have. If they're native applications, they are all using different programming languages and there's way around that I teach at TechSpeak just so that people understand that you can build once and kind of release everywhere, but those are never like if that's your business. It's not a long-term solution.
Speaker 1:You're really not selling the job of the CTO to me here. It just sounds like a nightmare.
Speaker 2:So the CTO job is really fun because you're constantly solving problems and coming up with solutions.
Speaker 1:And to me.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of fun, I guess, depending on who you are.
Speaker 1:Your personality type thing here, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Personality type is very important for our CTO.
Speaker 1:I'd like to cover some of that, because one of the things that you talk about is the quality of the CU. I think we should.
Speaker 2:But should we finish the steps? You want to finish those steps.
Speaker 1:Number three yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, so number three. So we talked about validate prototype, and the third step was technical specifications. So this is where you determine how you're going to build something. So this is where you then start to write the explanations of what you're going to build and how you're going to build it. And this is the starting point for defining the criteria, so that there is no miscommunications. If you don't have technical specifications, everyone's going to be thinking that different things in their mind, and that's where a lot of the mistakes, very expensive mistakes, happen.
Speaker 1:That's really logical. That's like building a car without a schematic right. You're not going to do that A lot of people skip that step and it's yes, they do, or they don't define it properly, right?
Speaker 2:So, there's many different ways and levels of doing it. So you can do it on a high level. So most people do it probably on a high level. But the more detailed the requirements, the better. Right, because there's fewer miscommunications, the better and faster you can actually execute because everybody's on the same page.
Speaker 1:And less technical debt in the future. When you have to try and make mistakes, you all may have Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the fourth step is to then pick the tools and the technologies that you're going to use and then add that to your technical specifications. So the way that I approach it again the lean and agile methodologies is how can you get the product out the fastest? And that oftentimes means that we use third-party tools, different APIs available, maybe no code tools there's lots of tools that are available third-party solutions and how do you combine that with some hybrid custom coding, rather than custom coding the whole thing yourself?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me see.
Speaker 2:And most developers don't think like that. Because they love writing code, they always recommend a custom solution for you.
Speaker 1:We'll build it all from scratch.
Speaker 2:Yeah, especially if it's a freelance developer or an agency that you're working with. They make their money by building stuff for you, and so that's why it's so important for entrepreneurs to know what their options are, because then they can require that in their conversations. That's why I'm teaching that this is golden gold here, isn't it the entrepreneur?
Speaker 1:if they understand this, they don't get led down the garden path of we must build this very complicated thing from scratch. It will take me 400 days at $1,000 a day, whereas actually some of this whether it's a library, no code or API form will already exist, like why you wouldn't build a mapping engine now. You would just use Google Maps as a, I guess, a simple example.
Speaker 2:Exactly, that's exactly right. So I teach entrepreneurs all of this stuff so that they are then empowered to know what they don't know, to ask the right questions, to intervene and be a part of the discussions, rather than blindly trusting the professionals to make all the decisions. And then, when the relationship doesn't work out or it ends, then they discover all of the decisions and how they were all not in their favor.
Speaker 1:I have an acquaintance. He probably doesn't listen to this. He's a very smart developer. He's, effectively, over 20 years, built himself a library of software tools. He gets NewGig plug this, this, this, this together, right, the code that joins it all up. That's going to take 40 days, isn't it? Yeah, and that's how you manage to run lots of projects at the same time and have many more cars than me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so knowing all of this stuff is really important to be able to control.
Speaker 2:So, the fifth step is to determine the price and budget. Because here again, going back to so, this is all tied with the requirements and picking the right tools and the technologies, but how you're going to implement something so the UI of some of it is more complex than others how much are you going to build the front end versus the back end? All of those decisions are going to determine how much things cost. Believe it or not, a $10,000 project and a $50,000 project estimate for the same exact project could be completely legitimate, Because, depending on how you structure and what you build and how you build it, you could pay $10,000 and be okay with it, or you could also pay $50,000 and be okay with it. And so here I teach people how to understand what goes into pricing and budgeting so that they can then require. Instead of saying how much is this going to cost to the developer, they can say this is my budget, let's figure out what can we build with that. So it's a very different kind of mentality for that.
Speaker 1:But it's educational, Otherwise you are just relying on whatever you get told.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, it's all about unbecomingjerkers having the control and being a part of the discussion. For me, okay. So the sixth step is where you can start to hire a developer, but not for coding. You are hiring them so they can help you estimate the day of functionality. So now, in the fifth step, you're also determining what your MVP will be. So the thermal viable product, so you could have 20 different features, but you decide that you're going to only build this five as your MVP. So now you are hiring a team to help you estimate what that's actually going to cost, because before we did budgeting estimation and now we're actually going through the details and say Work estimation.
Speaker 2:Work estimation, exactly. So you're hiring the developers for that. And step number seven is you're hiring a designer to design your MVP. And then you go to step number eight, which is where you are writing code.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. I heard the answer. You break it out of that because it all makes sense me thinking backwards, but nobody told me that when I started this. Yes, it's a very different thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, If anybody is interested in learning more and dive deeper into the steps and find out what the rest of the two steps are, they can go to techspeakforentrepreneurscom and scroll down to the bottom. There's a free video course there that they can-.
Speaker 1:It'll be here somewhere. It'll also be in the show notes. Yeah, because I've actually got good enough final cup roto and I put slidy stuff in so we can have like one, two, three, four. It'll be a little awesome. And then I'll have nine and 10 paid for access.
Speaker 2:It's actually free, so you can go in and check it out. I always break that.
Speaker 1:I was just creating the demand for you there and the expectation that people would actually have to pay for the magic secrets of nine and 10. Oh, dear, you see that as the technical aspect there. That was just doing your marketing for you to have a little thing here, so click here to buy.
Speaker 2:Now I want for people to understand the steps, and if they want to learn how to implement them, they can then take the course.
Speaker 1:That's the thing, isn't it? Paying it forward, give something out, get something back. So let's talk through this is one of the trickiest cars in a startup is the CTU. Because if the CTU especially isn't in the founding team, because Bill and Jane have got a great idea and they go to one of their mates who put some angel money in her preside and they say, yeah, sounds awesome and we've tested it, we've asked them, they've got to bring the CTU.
Speaker 1:So there's three questions out there what qualities do the CTU have? And understanding the roles and I think this isn't just the CTU at different stages, I think this happens to the CEO and the CMO and all the C3 guys who start this stuff up, because I think they all build fit the next Facebook and go all the way to the billion dollar IPO it doesn't happen to many, many people and then where to find one and how much to pay them, I guess. So let's start with in your mind, let's take the earlier stages of a business, as opposed to hiring the CTU of IBM. What qualities are we looking at?
Speaker 2:Well, so just before we talk about the qualities, I think it's really important to understand what you're looking for, depending on the stage you're in.
Speaker 2:Okay, so in the beginning stages, when people say I need a CTU, so you're just coming up with an idea, and people come up to me and they say, nelly, I need a CTU or I need a technical co-founder. What they're really asking, or what they're really saying, is that they need a developer who can work for equity to help them build the first version of their product Right, and so what they're looking for is a coder and and just kind of for the Exactly.
Speaker 2:So they're looking for a coder and they, when you're saying in the early stages, the understanding has to be that the title that you give out is a marketing ploy. Right, you're giving out the CTL title to entice someone to join your company, but what they are doing, their major job responsibility, is coding. Very little management, because there's probably no other team members to manage. But as they grow, as the team evolves, then it shifts from coding to management and once you become the CTO of IBM, then you do know coding or management. You are a divisionary.
Speaker 1:You probably haven't touched the keyboard to code for 20 years.
Speaker 2:if you ever get that job right, yes, so understanding the stages of the CTO, depending on what your company is, will help you figure out what skill set they will need to have.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So we'll talk about, and the things that I will outline now is for the manager CTO, right? So this is not the coder, cto.
Speaker 1:We're going past the MVP. We've got that, we've got something, and now we're going to employ some developers. So what qualities does that person have to have?
Speaker 2:Yes, and as in the early stages, when you're just as a side note if you're looking for a CTO, you should be looking for all of these qualities as well, because if that person cannot graduate into the role of the next stage CTO, then you will have to have a very difficult conversation with them, because you most likely will have to replace them or they hire someone above them that they would have to report to. So be mindful of all of these characteristics or qualities that I'll mention, because you want to be able to find someone who already has those or is even interested in graduating, because at that point it's going to be very hard for you to transition. That's where a lot of founding teams even fall apart because they have this disagreement on expectations.
Speaker 1:It's really hard, especially if you say, like the younger people have an idea of raise, pre-seed, call them CEOs, cmo, cto, whatever else. Get somewhere, get rid of it with more money and investors go. Listen, chaps, you're really going somewhere now, but we need some heavier hitters in here. And when you read the horror stories of people being moved sideways and when they take it badly and the key thing is here if your investor is going this way but you're not quite ready and I'm going to put this great person, you still have your equity, by the way, and you sit there as customer or vision champion, wherever you get called, you're still there and actually you've got more chance of success, because I think that some of the stuff is like when you insist on I will be the CTO, despite my man of management skills being rubbish, because I was a good enough developer to build the first iteration right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's happened? A lot.
Speaker 2:It happens a lot and I think if you're mindful of it from the beginning, you will prevent this problem from happening, because it's a very different like a developer is very introverted. Generally, a lot of developers just simply want to write code and they hate management right. So you don't want to get that person, unless you're I mean if you're in that situation, it's better to outsource the first version of your product to a development team for hire, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because they're just going to write the code for you and then continue to search for that high level type person to cook and then manage the process and the team as the company grows.
Speaker 1:And it's not all technical either, is it? I mean, one of my investors. Remember him saying oh God, it was something along the lines of one of the problems you'll see later on Alistair is that across all areas, right, people come in. They're really good at something could be project management, could be product, something could be and as you get bigger, there's a tendency just to lift them up and put people underneath and actually you lose the magic. They were just really good at that and you should have paid them more to sit there and stay there and have other people go around them. And that's the managing of the ego. Like you're really good at this, we would give you this job, but we're not going to. So we're going to pay you that role just to stay here, because then you share your knowledge with your peers, and that is quite a difficult, brave managing thing to do.
Speaker 2:It's very, very hard, very difficult to you know, because everybody wants to have a career advancement and if you're starting at the top as a CTO, there's no, there's no way to go about right, if that person cannot rise to that role, the only way to go is down or out.
Speaker 1:That's brutal. That's brutal, isn't it?
Speaker 2:You think about it like that, right, and that's a very, very hard thing to do because, I mean, most people start at the bottom and they earn their way to the top. You cannot get to the top unless you have the skills.
Speaker 1:Yes, the whole startup thing, hyper-tracking people to job titles which like 20 years ahead, and because you can build a thing and because it can work and it can scale fast, you then get people. What was it? The guy who I did the first ever work with in 1999, he used to say people rise to the point of their own incompetence and the effect of incompetent when they get to incompetent. And the people why are they there in that job? And that's when they've gone too far Shred. It's like blunt, you know. They were like well, we'll train you up beyond that. I was like no, that's the bit where you're just like never going to get past Move. But that's a particular type of management style. It probably isn't O'Fey in 2020. Yeah, probably. I think you've got a bit of it in the US, but let's not go there. Well, one particular manager who perhaps does it exactly acts just like that. We're not. By the way, it's US election results day, so we're not discussing that because it's.
Speaker 2:We are not going to go there.
Speaker 1:We're not going to go there Because I live I don't know how many you and New York, so I'm, however, many thousands of miles away. It doesn't really bother me because it doesn't affect me. It really doesn't. I feel like I'm upset over here and it's been on for weeks. I just have an interest because I have to ask. We must come back to the city, but just out of interest. Do you know the name of our prime minister? You see what I mean. I have to take five weeks of the US election. You can't even tell me what the name of the UK Prime Minister. Why have we got this obsession?
Speaker 2:Because he's actually not, I mean let's not even go there. No, let's not go there, let's not Doug Bolatix.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, but it is amazing because there's like I can hear it downstairs, right, yeah, because you're thinking you know, what I'd like to know is what the weather's going to be tomorrow so I can walk the dog, but I'm a heathen, so let's not go there, okay? So we're now sort of slight diversion just to set the scene of the date. We're talking about the role of the city in all the different stages of the startup and really we've covered it's developer, really to build an MVP, then you get a bit higher up from that, then you need some, then you need to employ some developers, so then you need to actually manage developers and obviously people. And then you're kind of going beyond that to a strategy point, I guess is you're going to go up this escalator of success and then you're getting to this seetio who's sitting at the top table saying this is the technical strategy and why we should do this right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And what does that person look like? Because you know how do you see the shape and the I'd say almost like the communication skills of that person to explain to non-technical people what they're talking about.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing I mean communication is huge If they have to be able to. They're responsible for translating business logic into technology, right, and so they have to be able to communicate both to very technical people, who are the developers, and totally non-technical people. And this ability to speak very technical terms in non-technical language in a way that's not demeaning, right, that's the power of a CTO. If you have to be able to get down to the level of the person you're talking to, not as soon as they understand all of the stuff you're saying, not talking in jargon, and all that because that's very disrespectful in my mind. I experienced a little bit of that when, early in my career, when I wasn't as in fact, I was still in school studying computer science, and I was, I was volunteering at this company, and the developer that I worked with just did this on a daily basis to me, so I know exactly how it feels, and I think that really defined my CTO career right there, because I vowed to myself that I would never do that to anyone.
Speaker 2:So to be able to do it in an empowering way is, I think, is really key for a good CTO to have, and they also have to have the knowledge like a very diverse knowledge of technology. The difference between a CTO and a developer is a developer has a finite set of skills that they're an expert in, and the CTO's responsibility is really to understand the technology ecosystem and the pros and cons of a lot of different tools and technologies, because they're going to be responsible for understanding, helping you understand what is the right tool to pick for different parts of whatever your business requires, and so that's a big distinction between the two. They have to know what's coming up also.
Speaker 2:As I say, future trends and understanding what's happening and what's coming around. And how can you take advantage of that? Because if you can jump on different trends and different things that are happening in the market and already be prepared for it in whatever software that you're in, that's going to give you a huge advantage.
Speaker 1:But without being a magpie, right? Shiny, shiny, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you don't want to get into, we have to adopt into every single shiny object. The CTO's role is to really understand both the business and the technology and make the decision for both. The best decision for both of those. It's never. Oh, we're going to just adopt this technology for no reason because they're now in a C-level executive. Right, they're thinking about the business.
Speaker 1:And the spending because, like tech, is expensive.
Speaker 2:Because they are also. They are given a budget, they are given certain responsibilities, so they're not thinking of. I got to get my hands on the shiny tool, which is what most developers like. They get excited about trying the technology so they can write code with it or whatever To the CTO's mindset is very different. They think about the bigger picture and how technology can be used to benefit the business and grow it and not randomly do it.
Speaker 1:We had a guy who love the guy we built the front-end and react and he thought, yeah, but pre-act better. And then, of course, a month later I was down in the office and he said we've gone back to react. I was like that's a waste of time and money. How much was it? How long did that take, right? Well, if we got it right, we'd have got 0.1 seconds off the time to paint. So, obviously, me being like, as you just said, like time to paint, you know. So, first of all, I was fobbed off with the confusing thing that Allison, when I understand, and then you find out it's like time 0.1 of a second to get the why? Because there's nobody there yet it's a startup, right, and that's when you have shiny, shiny magpie syndrome. Well, that's going to be way better. Get it in Lots of work, isn't that much better, actually, because of the problems. And then back to the old one. So I see, just, you wasted. You wasted so much money and even if it had worked, the customers wouldn't have noticed Exactly.
Speaker 2:Which is why, in the early days, if you don't have a CTO, you just have a developer, the responsibility for the business side of things, the customer centric side of things, has to fall to either you as the founder or a product manager that you have to put in place, and that's going to be their responsibility to really keep the developers in place and give them the knowledge that they need, because oftentimes you know it's really important to get the right type of developer in. In talk about hiring for DNA and values and qualities and all that. If your goal is to build customer centric apps and your developer is only interested in the shiny shiny, the next shiny object, there's never going to be a good fit right. They're always going to be miserable in their job. That developer who has that DNA quality should go work for some kind of lab, experimental lab at Google, where they are always experimenting with new technology yeah, shiny, shiny every day.
Speaker 2:Right, but not necessarily in the startup, because once you pick something, you have this kind of stick with it. You made a decision to do that, and it may not be as exciting as trying out new things, but that's what the business requires, and so you have to be okay with it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so now we know what we're looking for. So let's just let's go start up. I guess this depends where you are in, in which location, wise. But let's just say, like, how do you, how does how? Do a couple of young founders grow out and actually find they get the first stage of built in MVP? They've got to convince somebody to come in as a CTO we wear. There's so much demand for good CTOs. I imagine that they're. I would just imagine they're all gone. You have to pinch them from somebody else, right Is? Is that the best way?
Speaker 2:Well, because of, because there's so much demand, what I? I actually have a saying that you don't find a CTO, you have to earn one.
Speaker 1:Good, I like I like I like yeah, earn one. That's what it goes to. She knows that is the headline of this.
Speaker 2:You really have to earn one, because you have to realize that a good technical person who is okay with taking a risk of working in a startup, they don't need an idea person. They probably have their own idea that they're working on, right, always. So the side hustle, so there's always a side hustle, and because they can just simply build their own ideas, they're not interested in an idea person. So what you have to realize that with that reality that you can't find, you can't get those people. You have to now go after the other developers, the other great developers who don't have a problem finding a job in this environment. They're getting paid top dollar, they are getting everything they want from every single company right, so they are in high demand, okay. At the same time, lots of startups fail in their first year. So there's a big, a lot of risk, right. So one thing that I encourage non-technical founders to do is to try to figure out how to do risk, that opportunity for them, the time investment and the cost opportunity that they have to take. And the way to do risk it is by building your, validating your idea, which will show that it's not just an idea, that it has legs right.
Speaker 2:That's number two number one. Number two building a prototype, because you're now refining it. You've gotten the first step to actually showing it to customers. You got them excited. Number three you have to build a following. This is where you can start to build a community and a following on social media. Build an email list. This will again show that you're not just an idea person, that you are a marketer, and then you can get your customers to get around the idea right. So you're now showcasing your skills as a business person and that you're not just an idea person, which is the biggest problem that people pitching developers like we just need somebody to help me code this thing right, but what can you do? This is a way to show them. And number three put some money to build the MVP of your own money, because that shows that you're committed, you have skin in a game and that you will do no matter. You will implement this idea, no matter what, whether this person is online with you or not Convection and validation, right?
Speaker 1:I've got proof. It's going to work and I'm going to do it. And here's, I'll put some money in and it's almost like if you do enjoy it, you're going to mess up. Exactly, it's a bit of a film.
Speaker 2:And here's the thing from a from an entrepreneur's perspective. You're doing two things. You are because you're only you're you're validating the idea, so you know you headed in the right direction. You're only building the MVP, so it's a small version of the product which will take you two to three months to build, maximum it should, if, if, if it takes longer than you're building way too much right, and then in two to three months you can then show some traction to somebody and the conversation changes from. I need you to here's a great opportunity.
Speaker 2:You see how it completely changes the game and the conversation, and so if you take those steps and you can actually you know you have to have a process. You have to know how to manage a developer that you're going to hire. So don't do it in a way like, if you don't know the process, figure out how to do it in a way that you're not going to spend thousands of dollars trying to build your MVP. If you do it correctly, you can very cost efficiently develop your MVP so that by the time you are talking to potential CTOs or call founders, you are at a much better standing on all different levels.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For them to say yes to you and, by the way, this is also something that you need to do for investors as well.
Speaker 1:That was done. If you can show them traction, it's so much easier to raise money.
Speaker 2:So it will help you build a team and it will also help you raise money, if that's what you want to do. And then two things you're going to do in parallel. So you know that it takes, you know, to find a really good quality CTO or a technical co-founder, it's going to take you six months plus. It takes time. So don't settle for anybody. Just know that it takes time.
Speaker 2:You have to interview them, you have to make sure that they match your DNA, your company DNA, all the skill sets, the high level skill sets that we talked about and that can take time. So, parallel to that, as you're looking, you have your search going. We'll get into that in a second. You're going to risk the opportunity for them by building your like, validating the idea and building your prototype. And the best way to meet CTOs and technical people?
Speaker 2:In my mind, yes, you can post the job on the job board, you can go to your network and all that, but to me, the best place to do that is by going to technical meetups, by actually getting ingrained in a community and building relationships with technical people. And I know this is very intimidating for a non-technical person to go into a room full of nerds, but it's if you do it in a proper way. You're just going, you're there to listen, you're there to learn and then, when you're comfortable to speak, then you start to actually be in an environment where people start to respect you, to then have meaningful conversations with you, and so you should never appear needy. You should never pitch your idea and tell people to join your startup when you meet them.
Speaker 1:It's like when you just met those, it's like going on one of these sort of speed dating things, but no exactly.
Speaker 1:Right, you go and you and you can almost visualize what you see, because I've been to a couple of technical kind of meetups and sat there going, what are we talking about?
Speaker 1:But actually the conversations are actually interesting Once you get away from the fact that we're talking about whatever the technical thing that I don't understand. And then you get these really great conversations with people and they tell you all about the things they're doing and it's all very exciting and you listen to them and then they say what do you do? And you say I'm building this thing over here. It's going to be the biggest car start judge in the world. And they go, wow, yeah, and this guy puts money in, wow. And then of course, you'd let you say you've done the validation at that point, Right, so now that's quite. And then I think also listening to the lines that you're saying is the other key thing here is it's got to be interesting, but it's got to be a. I don't really just want to make a slightly better mouse or what you know, a slightly better version of something. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:It's actually going to intellectually stimulate me to want me to get the hours in to get your product going, because it isn't just about yeah, customers, yeah, that's where the validation comes from, because if you can show that there are people interested in this thing, they're willing to pay money for it, that they're going to be using it. That in itself is exciting to hear, rather than oh, I have this idea and you know nothing about it. Right, it's like when something is in an idea phase, it's so abstract that it's really hard to get behind it. But once you start to see traction, once you start to show that there's people, you just make it real.
Speaker 1:Here's a thing like a loop, it's like that, it's a real thing.
Speaker 2:I just need the conversation becomes. Look what I was able to do without you, imagine what we can do together. Imagine how much faster we can move. It's a very empowering position to be in. And so, as you're doing these things in parallel and you started to have conversations with technical people and you started to see traction at the same time. So hopefully, by the time you find your CTO or CTO or co-founder, you've already validated and build your manual viral product and it's going to be very easy for them to just say yes, and you're not spinning your wheels because I know something on it.
Speaker 1:You've done all the other stuff, so now it's really down to the money equity or whatever and if you've already have a product, you don't have to give as much equity.
Speaker 2:Because you've learned so much in that process, you already know you don't really need that person. You are in a much better position, from a power standpoint and a conversation standpoint, to then give away less of your company, both to investors and potential partners.
Speaker 1:Yeah, One of the things I've got my list for the next one is actually take more time in hiring and also we had a couple of issues of where we were located. But if you need to move, move to get the people and the whole problem has been solved now it's fabulous, and then take your time. The temptation of, I think one of the things I made was sprint, sprint, sprint, go, go, go, go, go go. And I think back now I think, ah, I should have just gone slower, spent less, got less people, taken more time, matured the product, had a better feel. And suddenly it says to me it's a marathon, not a sprint. And at the time I was like, yeah, yeah, you've got to go as fast as possible, beat everybody else, and it's just not true, Because the other people think Emma's going to copy their great idea. What they do is, of course, it's 99%. People think their idea is shit. Otherwise every investor would be standing outside your door going here's $10 million. Right, they don't do that. So not everyone thinks your idea is that good. But if you've got a bit of validation and customers and a few quid from an investor, you can take your time with the best people. I think that's a kind of magical mixing device there, Because you don't get otherwise.
Speaker 1:There's something I like to ask you about as well, and I think this is the funniest thing I've read in such a long time. It's so true. I'm just going to quote you on this If you don't mind. Talk about this, Doug. You were sent a video about a smart toothbrush with intelligent Bluetooth technology. It records your teeth brushing data so you can chart and share, which is weird. You can choose to moderately clean or super clean your teeth. And you were just wondering. This is a written thing you wrote down. I'm just wondering who is going to moderately clean your teeth. I mean, I'm all for a great oral hygiene, but really that is the problem with so much tech now, isn't it? I know we've gone off the CTO thing, but I think that's the funniest thing I've read all day. It's so true. Like it happens in cars like a lot.
Speaker 1:Here's a useless widget, there's one on my golf. I just got a golf right and it's like you got a slightly screen now, so I'm almost crashing every day because I can't concentrate on the screen. I don't have any drives at Tesla and it's got like 400 colors. I can choose for the LED lighting. Whoever wanted 400 colors and who said so? What do you do, guys? We spend an extra seven pounds per car on these 400-cod LED lighting device thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that, as a small startup, keeping your product simple and usable is going to be at a huge advantage Because of all the different things that you just mentioned, I mean the companies that come up with these ridiculous products.
Speaker 1:We should make it too close. You and I should make it too close. As a gimmick Sell a gimmick. That only just does enough. This, too, is awesome and rubbish and you can choose. I mean, it's just insane. Somebody thought like, moderately clean, I guess maybe you could have some gum problems or something. Maybe that's what it means. But we should have a list of all that kind of stuff, right, because I'm sure there must be people who do this all the time. I don't know if you've seen like an Instagram, right? If Instagram is my favorite place for technology products now, which are shit, and I, to be fair, though, I have bought one, and whatever you're interested in if it's yoga or a cycling, whatever is that you're interested in you'll always see these ads for the stuff that's you order, and it comes six weeks later Because it has to come from. This one's actually quite good, right? So this one, oh, ruinsy Greensfield, if you break it, gets brighter. That's pretty cool, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Battery runs out in four minutes.
Speaker 2:There, you go.
Speaker 1:Very useful, very useful, yeah, but I do love your toothbrush one. So how would you like to finish up? I think for now? 250 subscribers. By the way, when you agreed to come on, it was 150. I'll give all of that credit to you, not my advertising whatsoever. How would you like to finish up? I think it's been a great walkthrough how you'd look, for I think we should do. Definitely, the one to 10 list should be absolutely in the show notes. That's going to be. I think for a lot of people that's a really great thing just to stick in the wall and go remember Nellie's one to 10. Right, that's, I think that's. You should call it Nellie's one to 10, print out, laminate it. What closing discussions do you think just around that whole CTO piece? What are the most important points for you in that, in doing that?
Speaker 2:I think, becoming. Let's see. So we talked about a lot about getting into a power position.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think maybe we can close on that and just tell people that you really need to get educated about the process, about being tech literate and being a part of the conversation and trying to risk every single part of your business in very methodical ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have our 10 steps to getting started and we have, and then we'll have this. So, three reasons how you choose a CTO and what stage is, and the key thing really for founders. What you're saying is and this is what your your TechSuite for Entrepreneurs course is about you're a non-technical founder. You get this right, you can keep more of your company, you can attract a better CTO and, in the end, if you do both of these things, you'll have a better result.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Without losing a ton of money in the process.
Speaker 1:Which is always helpful, right? So how can them? Is TechSuite for Entrepreneurs? Is it global? Can people entrepreneurs from? Is it a you know? Is it a global online? It's going to teach? Yes, and how does it work?
Speaker 2:So it used to be an in-person bootcamp. Before COVID, I used to teach it over a weekend in bootcamp style for eight hours.
Speaker 1:Your audience has just been up by six 5.999 billion people right.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. I'm actually really excited about this because so many people have been displaced by COVID and I think getting into software is such an exciting opportunity. If you know what you're doing, a lot of entrepreneurs are positioned to have the domain expertise to actually, if they look for problems within the environment and in the industry that they're in no matter whether it's a technical industry or not there's a lot of opportunity to solve problems, and technology and software is a great way to do that. Definitely it's awesome for remote work and remote teams, and now anyone can hire anybody from across the world. I mean, you could before, but now it's more acceptable, right? It's weird, isn't it?
Speaker 1:It's like it doesn't, it hasn't changed, but somehow they're friends.
Speaker 2:It's really changed, but I think software lends itself to that. And I'm excited, I'm excited about people jumping on the software bandwagon and solving real problems and becoming entrepreneurs, and I'm here to empower them, to prevent them from making all of the mistakes and spending the time and the resources that are required to and wasted if you don't do it properly.
Speaker 1:You have a number one fan here. If I met you 10 years ago, I would have saved myself all this great hair, and I think what you do is fantastic. I think I love the fact that you had bootcamps like for real and in real in real, live bootcamps, and now anyone who's listening to this anywhere in the world can go. I want to learn that and enjoy it, and that's tech speed for entrepreneurs, and all the usual links will be in the show notes and I'll put them on the screen and I recommend it. Having done all the mistakes that you've talked about I mean every single one of them I think your course is fabulous and thank you so much for coming on. Confirm the TV.
Speaker 2:Thank you, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
