A couple months ago I received what I thought was the offer for an opportunity I have been waiting for a lifetime: being mentored by four very successful entrepreneurs in building a tech business.
The business in question is a SaaS aimed at SME. Over the course of the summer they had hired a freelancer full stack developer to build the MVP.
At my arrival it looked like the app just needed some touchups before launching. Instead, after playing more and more around with it, many bugs come out. And plus the UI/UX looked… let’s say not great.
But that was why I was hired as a CEO: to deal with this mess. My first order of business was to work with the developer to get the app in a good enough state, enabling its launch and the first paying customers.
To do so it needed a very in depth QA, bug fixing, a whole UI redesign and improvements on the AI-powered features.
Working with said dev has proved to be full of challenges. They deliver fast, too fast, thanks to vibe-coding; but with every bug I tell them to fix, new ones come out.
Since the co founding team wants to start the go to market phase as soon as possible, and pressures me to find ways to speed up the delivery, I pitch them to hire another developer to help only with the UI/UX and the frontend. Budget: 10 peanuts and a pepsi.
We hire one, for peanuts, on Upwork. After 10 days since sharing the requirements, they were
supposed to deliver the Figma designs. The delivery was comprised of almost half the agreed screens, and also badly made. After sharing some feedback and four more days of work, nothing changed much. Not that my expectations were high anyway. We dismiss them.
It was time to recruit another front end dev. This time, armed with the previous experience, i better know how to discern a good one.
I find a couple of them. But, as I expected, their prices were 10x the peanuts I had available as budget.
Fine, since the first dev cannot be trusted and hiring someone else is a no go, I shall do things myself. How hard can it be, I thought: so many people are doing this for a living.
The backend is in PHP. The front end is React. I have never worked with any of those. Being in data science for the past 10 years didn’t really help me developing full stack web apps.
But I mean, with AI and everything, this should be easy and fast no? Except even with AI this feels too big of a task to tackle.
And so many doubts pop into my head. How do I know I am doing the right things? Will I introduce more technical debt than any incumbent financial institution currently has? Will it just take me too long? I cannot waste any more time. I don’t want to let the Board down.
The quick/cheap/good Venn diagram never felt so true. My personal inclination is to choose cheap+good. Cheap because i like to do things myself, also as a learning process. Good because I tend to be kind of a perfectionist.
But quick is what the cofounders want. They should now that the trifecta quick+cheap+good is not achievable. They should have experience with that. And yet, it feels like i need to actively manage their expectations.
Right now I gave the UI specs to the first full stack dev we hired. I hope we can reach a good enough point.
I only would like to start everything myself from scratch. Either way, I don’t feel there is a right choice.
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