CTO on Demand
Hi, what do you think about the CTO as a service for non tech founders? Founder approaches us with an idea and we deliver to him the break down of what it will take to make that idea happen in real life.
- startups, in general, and especially before any funding, have cashflow issues. So you might deal with lots of late or non payments
- non tech founders can have technically infeasible ideas, and don’t understand how hard/costly tech gets. If things go south, consultants make great scapegoats
- non tech founders starting a tech company may struggle to get funding without a solid, fully committed true tech cofounder
- founders in general don’t have experience with hiring software contractors. They don’t have people on staff that understand contract terms. They could sign something without understanding it, only later to get mad that they paid for dev hours on a feature the founder changed their mind on weeks later.
- if the product isnt successful, consultants make great scapegoats. It’s often going to be your fault, because that’s easier than admitting the product was bad.
I think for it to work you have to be someone truly committed to the founders problem space. You have to really be good at assessing whether someone’s an asshole, and likely to scare you over. You have to be amazing at building trust and showing commitment to this individual. This relationship will make or break you. It may end up not being far off from actually being a cofounder!
If it were to work, then it should have long-term focus. So act as a busines angel/VC "knowledge fund". Get a few percentages of ownership and hope to one day have advised some successful companies. Maybe have a deal where you transition from On Demand CTO to Board member as the company grows and can hire a fulltime CTO.
Another point should probably be to only take on startups that have actually been incorporated in some way that enables percentages to be exchanged. Otherwise I can see a lot of wasted time on peoples great ideas.
Seen from the other perspective you would probably also struggle a bit to gain traction. Have a good track-record for founders to contact you and give a way a few percentages. They should be comfortable that you can actually help them and that they can have enough of your time to make a difference.
After writing this I actually think it less of an un-viable idea than when I started writing :)
Only issue I see here is "Founder approaches". It's not just gonna happen from nothing. Either you will have to approach or someone will have to connect you. In my case it was a friend of an employee of a non tech founder.