Do you plan to raise outside capital in the near future, or bootstrap? With a seed round: low-volume but time-intensive recruiting (and of course coding). Alth

Do you plan to raise outside capital in the near future, or bootstrap? With a seed round: low-volume but time-intensive recruiting (and of course coding). Although you might only hire 2 or 3 people in the first year, they'll - hopefully - be your biggest contribution. The difference in output between a good 3-person team with decent leadership, and a fantastic 3-person team with outstanding leadership, is probably bigger than your own contribution as an individual developer. If so, the quality of the people you recruit, and how well you lead that team to quickly and thoroughly test the seed round hypothesis, will probably be your biggest contributions. Of course, you're still coding too. OR… As long as you're bootstrapping: CTO is developer, dev ops engineer, architect, most or all of product manager, and part or all of customer support and sales engineer. That continues until you have enough revenue to consider hiring someone at least part-time, which could be months or years. Think of yourself as a very committed individual contributor, or a product manager who has 1 developer. As a 1-person engineering team, the biggest contribution you can probably make is deciding which problems not to solve, and which large swaths of the remaining problems not to solve. Make sure you're working on something people want. What half of any scope can you cut? Is feature X really as valuable as you or others think? Can you verify that with a day of work? Finally, in both worlds: figure how who is handling product management. Who choose the functionality? Prioritizes it? Sketches the UI wireframes? Writes the UI copy? If you all are involved, is the CEO ultimately responsible for product/market fit, and if so, do they break disagreements?