But he said he wanted to work on a project while he was doing it.
This is a very good sign. This is someone proactive and able to think independently and launch projects on his own. That's a solid start.
I told him to start a small business, maybe even just be a freelancer for a while and see if he enjoys the traveling lifestyle. He then told me that he's always wanted to start businesses and do his own thing instead of corporate grind, but he wasn't creative enough to get any decent ideas.
This is also good - you can complement his skill sets.
I'm the Kirk to my CTO, who is a Spock type. You should spend some time figuring out his relative strengths/weaknesses as well as your own.
One random thing that has really helped me in terms of figuring this out is taking several Meyers-Briggs tests (just to see if they produced the same result). I got the same result multiple times - ENFJ.
My CTO cofounder got INTJ, which is almost a perfect fit. We've been working together for about 3 years so it was always clear that we were a good fit but it was interesting to see an analysis.
Everything seemed genuine. My friend, who is a very stand up guy, vouched for him.
That's very good. I did not get a reference for my CTO and it took about 6 months of trial and error collaborating on a few small projects for us to really get the hang of working together. If he is coming recommended and seems like a trustworthy person then you are probably in good hands.
He's already been throwing down code to get started and has valuable business advice as well, for example he talked me out of doing a fast and dirty beta launch in favor of waiting longer and publishing a nicely polished product.
That's great news. He's action oriented and already putting in some leg work. That's the other half of the equation after the integrity part, is figuring out if the person will actually do any work and if they are competent at said work.
I've worked with skilled people who were lazy as shit and I've worked with incompetent people who were hard workers. In both situations we ended up with failed projects.
Not sure if I necessarily agree with waiting for a nicely polished product, though. Is it possible for you to hand pick about 50 initial beta users to get some feedback?
It's possible that the nature of your product won't necessarily allow this to happen.
The fallback for this is - is there a way to do this without the use of technology?
Let's say that you are beta testing the idea for Airbnb. Those guys initially had a website with basically a contact form (I think) whereby people could rent an air bed and also get breakfast. The occasion was that there was some design conference in SF and hotels were overbooked, so they took advantage of their spare capacity.
Low tech and low cost but an effective means of vetting their user demographics. As we all know, they eventually spread to becoming "the ebay of spaces" and took off like a rocket.
As such, I would suggest that you find creative low cost and low tech ways to begin building an audience and vetting and testing them. Also try to actually get money from them, in the same way that the Airbnb guys did before they had a juggernaut platform/app up.
This is a strong way to both test your initial audience, do some great guerrilla marketing and spread the word, and also potentially get some cash through the door. That cash makes a big difference in the early days both from an income POV but also for morale - knowing that people will hand you cash for something that is basically an idea.
On that note - I don't know if your idea is conducive to crowdfunding but that's an avenue to consider if you guys are down with that.
Finally - something simple that you can do today is to throw up a landing page using
http://www.launchrock.co for the beta launch. The sooner you begin building a mailing list, the sooner you can begin talking to interested prospective users and seeing what sorts of things they want.
You can create a launchRock page for the idea under a different name without divulging details about yourself, and then posting a link to it on your RVF signature.
Then when guys sign up to what they think is a good idea for an app, you can get in touch with them with an anonymous email like antitraceRVF@gmail and do some private anonymous one-on-one rap sessions with them.
So let's say that your idea was Airbnb. You could put something in your signature like:
"Tired of staying at expensive hotels or crappy hostels? Sign up for an invitation to PoshLofts, a revolutionary peer-to-peer apartment sharing platform"
Something like that would appeal to a lot of RVF users and you could get a shit ton of information from guys that sign up and give you some good intel on what sort of product they would want to see.
I hope it works out, because I have tons of ideas but only beginner programming skills. I would love to have a competent CTO behind me so I can focus more on the business side of things.
It's very good that you have some hacking skills. Your CTO is probably quietly glad that you have some level of programming skills because it shows that you are serious about technical stuff and can speak his language, to a degree.
It sounds like the two of you are a good match.
To keep him interested and to prove your value with tangible results, I would start figuring out how to immediately begin doing some user recruitment and testing.
Throwing up a launchrock page and getting 100 signups by the end of January, for user feedback and surveying, would be a strong start.
My two cents.
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![[Image: idea.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/new/idea.gif)
. I think he misunderstands my idea for a quick and dirty launch, thinking it would be a public release. 