Mentorship Services

I've been helping early stage startups to get out of the ground for several years already. Early stage being here the space from idea to an autonomous, in house development team.

Here is a summary of how I can help you along that journey.

Services

Shaping your idea

As a business owner, you bring your experience and knowledge about a market. The part that is generally missing is an experience making a software product.

Software development is generally bad and expensive - even more so when unexperienced.

I can help you shape your idea, validate its worth, cut it in pieces, define what could be a limited v1 - prepare as much as possible before writing the first line of code.

My summary of this is generally: I can't prevent you from losing 5k€, but I can prevent you from losing 50k€.

Helping with an external development team

A common way to have software developped before having an in house team is to go through a web agency. I can help you prepare the work and serve as a second opinion when needed. My edge here is to be able to speak both languages - business and technical.

Mentoring junior developers

Most early stages startups won't have the money to get an experienced CTO on board early. This is mainly due to market conditions (75% of the founders are non technical, and the developer job market is very good, so attracting a CTO early is very difficult).

One way I can help here is by providing mentorship to your first developer. Helping them split the work in manageable chunck, avoiding big technical mistakes, reviewing their code and answering their questions.

Being the first developer in a company is a lonely and stressful job, even when experienced. I'm proving external leadership and a second opinion.

Growing your team

As things evolve, you'll need to expand your team - both in numbers and seniority. I can help you interview or select people.

I can also help your lead dev/CTO in managing a development team and a product roadmap as their job move from mostly coding to a much broader set of activities.

How

Generally speaking, because I've been there before. Companies and experiences are never the same, but there are a good number of "big" questions or issues that are the same.

I've seen them first hand - both in the company I cofounded and in several others I joined since, either as a developer, a CTO or a technical advisor.

Getting started

My starting point is usually a lunch - time for you to explain to me your business, where you are and start figuring out how I can provide value.

Sometime that's actually "enough" to get the founder think/review their approach and we juste leave it there (or until next time).

When it's not, we move into a more structured approach for one or several of the points above.

Except if the project is really small, I generally don't propose to code the MVP myself - I lack the time to do so in a proper way.

Interested? Let's have a lunch! Drop me an email at martin@joyouscoding.com