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Ask HN: How are you planning to scale up your startup?
You are an amazing hacker and a product geek. You are capable of building products that are relevant & sticky. But you probably not sure how to scale up your startup when the product fits the market. May be due to lack of experience in running a "business" in the past.
There are 2 ways to solve this.
1. Hire a professional CEO like what Sergey and Larry did by hiring Eric Schmidt as CEO.
2. Get a professional business/executive coach to guide you. Apparently Mark Zuckerberg was coached. (http://www.quora.com/When-did-Mark-Zuckerberg-seek-the-help-of-a-CEO-coach-Who-was-is-the-coach-and-who-made-sure-Mark-was-convinced-to-hire-one)
What will you do?
Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of www.coatom.com and your answers helps me making it relevant & useful.
- mittermayr 13y agoSeems a bit like a marketing pitch rather than a question? Are you interested in other answers than those random two? The great thing about scaling startups is that your knowledge on scaling also scales along just as well, inherently. Professional CEOs are not necessarily just scaling experts, they're often brought into to take over the 'not product-development' tasks of running a company. Making sure the financing keeps going, everyone has their work computers, coordinating HR with work load and budget, coordinating with Marketing. A lot of scaling in tech startups is nothing a CEO is necessarily pushing. It's often the CTO, or lead developers and infrastructure guys who make sure the product scales and holds up to demand. And, my experience with business coaches in the tech industry right now is that this is a hit or miss type of world, where most of the time, you actually, sadly, totally miss. There are some coaches or mentors worth their time out there, but you will rarely get anywhere near unless your product is exciting to them. If only money brings you closer to their knowledge, you'll probably be already one step into trouble. I always go by the simple check that when a business advisor is willing to invest his own money into the company, he's likely someone who would also care about our future. If he wants to bill me for giving me guidance, then I usually know what's up.
- devehere 13y agoInteresting perspective. Thanks Mittermayr.
- pskittle 13y agoYou should approach a VC whose focus should be advancing the business and not ROI only.Whatever you decide to do is going to be based on who you trust and it's impossible to make that decision for you , a starting point would be to get advisors in areas which are not your expertise.focus should be to develop complementary skill sets (within your team)and not have a misconception that you can be successful alone. there are different incubators ( some let you organically figure it out) some replicate working business models eg- http://www.rocket-internet.de http://www.rocket-internet.de