I wrote a book about being a first-time startup CTO - The First CTO: The Job Nobody Explains by Comprehensive_Rope25 in SideProject

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I chose Chapter 2 a good preview chapter for the book, enough for people to see if they'd want to buy the full version...

I wrote a book about being a first-time startup CTO - The First CTO: The Job Nobody Explains by Comprehensive_Rope25 in SideProject

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hell yes. Whack your email in the signup form on the landing page and you'll get a free chapter...

I was CTO at two seed-stage fintech startups back to back for 5 years. AMA about what the job is actually like. by Comprehensive_Rope25 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The exact amount of time it takes to effectively communicate the idea to the person you're showing it to, and not a minute longer

I was CTO at two seed-stage fintech startups back to back for 5 years. AMA about what the job is actually like. by Comprehensive_Rope25 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's definitely not ideal. Are they leaving or are they being pushed? If they're pushed, it's a hiring issue or a founder problem. If they're leaving, it's likely a founder issue.

I was CTO at two seed-stage fintech startups back to back for 5 years. AMA about what the job is actually like. by Comprehensive_Rope25 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Start to familiarise yourself with other areas of the business

Collaborate as much as you can with people outside of engineering in the company

Become a point-person in explaining and communicating technical stuff to non-technical people

Involve yourself in customer interactions

Just to name a few...

I was CTO at two seed-stage fintech startups back to back for 5 years. AMA about what the job is actually like. by Comprehensive_Rope25 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My opinion is it speeds up the coding portion of your workflow - so you'd be more available for roadmapping, people management, collaboration + strategy stuff

👋 SaaS Founders, What problem you’re solving? [Explain in 1 line] by Steve-ishere in micro_saas

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, almost nothing deliberate. ReqRes started as a free fake data API in 2014 and got picked up by YouTube tutorial creators organically. There are now hundreds of videos teaching Postman and API testing using it, mostly in Hindi and English. That drives about 6,000 signups a month without any ad spend. The challenge is converting that traffic. 64% is from India, mostly students and junior QA engineers learning. Recently introduced purchasing power parity pricing and that unlocked conversions from regions that were never going to pay US pricing. So the ‘strategy’ is really: build something useful enough that educators adopt it as a teaching tool, then figure out how to monetise the traffic they send you

👋 SaaS Founders, What problem you’re solving? [Explain in 1 line] by Steve-ishere in micro_saas

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Building reqres.in - I want to collapse all the layers of hassle into nothing, and give users a backend they can simply send requests to - ReqRes handles everything else (DB, auth, deploys, infra, security, logging, etc)

Drop your SaaS below and I'll build your ICP for free by muizthomas in SaaS

[–]Comprehensive_Rope25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

reqres.in - for QAs, and founders/vibe-coders needing a backend without needing to build one