I’m still not sure that the way I grow at Asap is the right way to grow. I want to learn how to build products for customers and I want to build them along the way. I’m not sure if I should focus more on tech or on the product side. Anyways, I hope that I’ll have a dive into the business part during this weekend, which will give me more context to kick off my product thinking. I feel the anxiety of a blank sheet as I think about the product role. I can solve anything tech - building a web/mobile app and potentially scaling it. I kinda think of myself as a product manager whenever I think about Snakify. That’s not yet the case with Asap - I just don’t have any ideas [maybe because I don’t have any product tasks given out to me].
I have slept only 6:30 and I feel that my brain operates a bit differently. I just realized that the main focus for Snakify for now should be shipping 50 new problems as a Snakify Plus offer for existing teachers on the existing platform for $99/year. Clearly I was inspired by reading Intercom on starting up, especially their pricing chapter. But also that was the thing I already started doing in July and abandoned. As I realized there’s no fast and easy way to build Snakify 2 as a new codebase, I should test a smaller hypothesis first by tweaking the monolith from 2012 that I currently have.
I want this to be my lemonade. I want to make a button somewhere in the universe that says “Ship some money to this guy in exchange to the value he created, because I personally value it at least this price”. If there’s no button, no one can press it.
I want this to be my lemonade. I want to make a button somewhere in the universe that says “Ship some money to this guy in exchange to the value he created, because I personally value it at least this price”. If there’s no button, no one can press it.
The second insight of today is that I should join <> and <> on their first trip to LA. For me, the development is no risk. I can’t learn much here, building this product seems boring. For me, the actual risk is the ability to launch something in the US. So to mitigate it, I should get a first-person experience. I should be there, talk to venue staff and to potential users, I should learn how to pitch, I should be in the epicenter. There’s the actual learning that I can get in 2017. If I have money and credibility for it, I should get it.
Yesterday I got the offer and I accepted it. The offer details are the following:
Out of 8’000’000 shares authorized for founders during C-corp formation, I get 800’000 (10%), subject to 4 years vesting with 1 year cliff. The vesting starts on July 6, 2017. Thus, on July 6, 2018 I should get my first 200’000 shares. This is not an option, these shares are “already mine” and give me the voting power. <> claims that he filed 83(b) election on time.
Their shares are not yet written in bylaws, as no one's are. We’re still in the progress of negotiations. Namely, I assume that <> and <> have some fair split confirmed between them (maybe 2:1), and the rest of the team (me, <> and <>) will get around 30% of the founders’ shares. The exact numbers and conditions are subject to hard discussions, because the roles are changing, the demands are changing. I personally go to the milestone July 6, 2018 with the goal to show a performance that makes it ridiculous to fire me right before that date. Then we’ll see what the state of our business is.
On top of that we all get “the money to survive”. I claimed it to be 20k rubles to my Asap balance. While the offer’s conditions ask me to be Asap a primary thing I keep in my mind, I also want to maintain a financial independence, especially given that I already set up a passive income with Snakify.
The guys are happy to see me in LA helping them, and “the money to survive” in LA are gonna be around $2k per person per month - for direct living and food expenses. The only blocker here is that we have an arising project in Moscow - Asap.Staff should become a default POS terminal on a new food market launching this winter. Once I have this project set to success, I’m free to come to LA and take part.
I felt happy yesterday after I accepted it and now I still feel happy - while I was constantly nervous in August and September due to ongoing negotiations. That’s a good sign. These 10% are sharply expressing the stage I joined at, my skills, my expectations of my commitment and such.
Out of 8’000’000 shares authorized for founders during C-corp formation, I get 800’000 (10%), subject to 4 years vesting with 1 year cliff. The vesting starts on July 6, 2017. Thus, on July 6, 2018 I should get my first 200’000 shares. This is not an option, these shares are “already mine” and give me the voting power. <> claims that he filed 83(b) election on time.
Their shares are not yet written in bylaws, as no one's are. We’re still in the progress of negotiations. Namely, I assume that <> and <> have some fair split confirmed between them (maybe 2:1), and the rest of the team (me, <> and <>) will get around 30% of the founders’ shares. The exact numbers and conditions are subject to hard discussions, because the roles are changing, the demands are changing. I personally go to the milestone July 6, 2018 with the goal to show a performance that makes it ridiculous to fire me right before that date. Then we’ll see what the state of our business is.
On top of that we all get “the money to survive”. I claimed it to be 20k rubles to my Asap balance. While the offer’s conditions ask me to be Asap a primary thing I keep in my mind, I also want to maintain a financial independence, especially given that I already set up a passive income with Snakify.
The guys are happy to see me in LA helping them, and “the money to survive” in LA are gonna be around $2k per person per month - for direct living and food expenses. The only blocker here is that we have an arising project in Moscow - Asap.Staff should become a default POS terminal on a new food market launching this winter. Once I have this project set to success, I’m free to come to LA and take part.
I felt happy yesterday after I accepted it and now I still feel happy - while I was constantly nervous in August and September due to ongoing negotiations. That’s a good sign. These 10% are sharply expressing the stage I joined at, my skills, my expectations of my commitment and such.
Yesterday I started a new round of hiring. We interviewed <> - a guy of comparable experience like our juniors - maybe a bit more. He originally asked for 120k rubles per month. <> replied that while we’re on a pre-seed stage, we’re cutting the costs, and asked whether we can pay less while giving more growth, responsibility or something else to compensate.
I’m slowly recovering from the imbalance between “my backlog”+ “external backlog” (i.e. meetings with friends and attending city events) vs. work. For the fourth week in a row I’m cutting brunches and @sns_msk chat meetings - all to have some spare time with myself
Luckily, the rest of the team is unblocked: the communication paths are built between products and engineers, engineers are talking with each other as well, there are enough assigned tasks for the next couple of days, and I even have the feeling that we maintain the tempo for team size growth. So the day doesn’t require me coordinating everyone and I can take my own engineering tasks.
I don’t see any easy way to claim back the time I spent working on weekends. Once the workday starts, it’s very hard to detach from work chats. Everyone needs help, attention, advice etc. I wonder if the vacation is possible any time soon.
Luckily, the rest of the team is unblocked: the communication paths are built between products and engineers, engineers are talking with each other as well, there are enough assigned tasks for the next couple of days, and I even have the feeling that we maintain the tempo for team size growth. So the day doesn’t require me coordinating everyone and I can take my own engineering tasks.
I don’t see any easy way to claim back the time I spent working on weekends. Once the workday starts, it’s very hard to detach from work chats. Everyone needs help, attention, advice etc. I wonder if the vacation is possible any time soon.
I’m starting a doc on back-end development. I want to implement one feature that touches many parts - DB migration, API, old admin interface, new admin interface. I hope that once I document it, the entire team and possible future team members will adopt it quickly.
I’m the guy who hires new developers using his network and skills, who plans the developers’ onboarding. <> helps me find the imperfect parts of our getting-things-done setup, and together we gradually speed up all processes and streamline the communication.
Once again I feel like the days when I haven’t slept enough are “special”. I don’t just feel like I think slowly, I think differently. It’s like a micro psychedelic trip that gives you new ideas.
I’m the guy who hires new developers using his network and skills, who plans the developers’ onboarding. <> helps me find the imperfect parts of our getting-things-done setup, and together we gradually speed up all processes and streamline the communication.
Once again I feel like the days when I haven’t slept enough are “special”. I don’t just feel like I think slowly, I think differently. It’s like a micro psychedelic trip that gives you new ideas.
<> said that she wants to start working with us. We couldn’t make her a competitive offer, so it’s a great sign for our team that she can take a pay cut. She’s going to combine working for us with working for some ICO agency - the latter should give her more money and less growth.
I also visited a coworking space at the <> high school and listened to the projects high school students are doing. I feel disoriented: it feels very hard to give any advice for the startups when they’re being done in setups I now consider “failing”. No release yet, the team consists solely of programmers, no real user pain, small market, part-time commitment - it all leads to frustration, and I don’t know how to fix it. It all gives a lot of learning points, but it's learning by pain. “Fail your first five startups as early as possible”, as I said today to high school students at our meeting.
We had a discussion with <> and <> about whether we need to know if our remote engineers work at any given time. For instance, did they already start working today, how much time do they plan to work today and so on. It sounds like micromanagement, and it is. I’m not sure it yields to any speed-up in development, as the control over constant messaging on its own shouldn’t be very motivating. Voice calls should though, I think.
Yesterday I posted our second job opening at my VK wall. Today I haven’t yet received any replies. Maybe there’s no capacity left among my friends - or I don’t actually need the guys I describe.
As now I started getting Fabric daily updates on our DAU, I don’t actually feel like our user base is growing significantly since I joined. We plan referrals - user->user and waiter->user - to boost our growth, but I’m not actually sure we can cover 10% of White Square cluster transactions in a year given the current dynamics. I don’t feel like the app implementation sucks because we just launched it. Either the product mechanics sucks or our marketing sucks. Or it’s just all going super slow. The offline materials - posters and stickers - were designed, printed and tested several weeks ago. Still for now the venue visitors still don’t have many ways to find out that Asap is launched and operating in this particular venue. It’s gonna be fixed, but it all takes time. Now I see how long-term it all is.
We should build an automatic process, a culture of clear and verbose reporting. So that when guys let us know in advance when they work today, what they’re going to do and when they expect to ship certain things (like “today in the evening” or “tomorrow morning”). Given that many of our features require support from several sides, this reporting becomes necessary to ship everything rapidly.
Some of my friends ask me why we don’t ask our programmers to give estimates for tasks that we put in a weekly plan - and doing the estimates for them on our own. Now it feels hard to plan the next week: you need programmers to be available during the planning phase, you need to explain the feature and carefully think about it. It feels like a waste of an entire day, yet in three-four days everything will change due to new requests and emerging bugs. And our planning day is usually Sunday.
As <> pushes hard, we try to establish a release train on the client app: test the build on Monday, roll out on Tuesday morning. The goal is to demonstrate the certain pace for users and for the team, to show the pulse of an ongoing work.
Today <CTO> came in person to Drinkit after his vacation. We had some discussions on security and premature optimizations, but the most significant was that he talked about his ongoing arguments with <> and <>. Then I’ve overheard bits of their hour-long discussion about possible leave, money/equity and such. It looks like there’s not so much help from <CTO> in the changed setup with many full-stack guys, and it’s hard for him to transformate his workstyle to actually be a CTO of Asap. Anyway, I’ve no idea what’s the outcome of their discussion, we’ll see.
<CTO> told me today that he’s going to continue the support of our project, but he can’t confirm the amount of time and whether he’s gonna develop something new. Well, on the one hand, that’s exactly the goal I wanted to achieve in early July when I just joined - to take the place of the CTO. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I explicitly tried to kick <CTO>.
... since May <CTO> was worked specifically for the equity and not for the salary. ... not sure whether the previous salary was completely paid to <CTO> or still presents a debt. Maybe I’ve overheard yesterday that there’s a debt of 400k in salary that company’s gonna return on the next round of investment.
The main conflict during the last several months was that <CTO> was mainly fixing bugs and not helping much with the team expansion and team leading. So <> and <> wasn’t eager to give him out a lot of equity. And <CTO> didn’t want to work for salary. The problem here is that <> and <> were doing these discussions harshly, pushing <CTO> to stress. That’s an issue that we as four remaining founders should fix, or otherwise it may blow up our team work in the future. Also, we should establish founder communications. Right now it’s a star topology: <>&<> are talking to me, <> and <CTO> separately. We feel like there are two level of founders, which isn’t that great.
I’m not sure what my fair equity portion is gonna be when <CTO> quits. I feel like I committed to 800k shares being a second development guy and not a “single point of failure”. Of course, my team strategy is to share as many processes as I can. But in case of fire - for instance, if we run out of money - that’s gonna be me who remains to support IT processes. Can I do that feeling fair for 10% equity?
... since May <CTO> was worked specifically for the equity and not for the salary. ... not sure whether the previous salary was completely paid to <CTO> or still presents a debt. Maybe I’ve overheard yesterday that there’s a debt of 400k in salary that company’s gonna return on the next round of investment.
The main conflict during the last several months was that <CTO> was mainly fixing bugs and not helping much with the team expansion and team leading. So <> and <> wasn’t eager to give him out a lot of equity. And <CTO> didn’t want to work for salary. The problem here is that <> and <> were doing these discussions harshly, pushing <CTO> to stress. That’s an issue that we as four remaining founders should fix, or otherwise it may blow up our team work in the future. Also, we should establish founder communications. Right now it’s a star topology: <>&<> are talking to me, <> and <CTO> separately. We feel like there are two level of founders, which isn’t that great.
I’m not sure what my fair equity portion is gonna be when <CTO> quits. I feel like I committed to 800k shares being a second development guy and not a “single point of failure”. Of course, my team strategy is to share as many processes as I can. But in case of fire - for instance, if we run out of money - that’s gonna be me who remains to support IT processes. Can I do that feeling fair for 10% equity?
The last five days were my first vacations while I’m at Asap. It was perfect timing, because right before I left almost all the development processes became independent of me: weekly planning and QA was done by <> and <>, and developers were able to develop back-end, peer review, merge and deploy. At the same time I was enjoying friends, another city and lowering my fomo-yolo lower again.
Today, as I came back, it felt almost like the first day: I should find where I can plug my time and knowledge to make something meaningful that wouldn’t occur otherwise.
Today, as I came back, it felt almost like the first day: I should find where I can plug my time and knowledge to make something meaningful that wouldn’t occur otherwise.
Today I started the onboarding of <> who’s currently seeking for new employment. He already got offers from <> and <> and he said that his baseline cost of living is 100k rubles, which we didn’t sponsor to anyone yet. That again will yield strange negotiations on Friday night when this trial period will end. Today he installed XCode and started getting synchronization bugs - so I’d say we spent the entire day on “front-end devops” - setting up the proper dev environment for mobile development.
Yet I believe our pair programming and real tasks strategy looks very competitive. Yesterday <> and I were making fun of a typical onboarding in a large company like Google where you get your laptop, your task and a codebase. Then, as you barely understand what happens where, you start looking around desperately until you find that the sufficient time passed for you to ask a manager what’s the next step of figuring things out.
<> moved to Moscow today and had his first day at <>. He’s going to work with us for ¾ of full-time - on weekday evenings and weekends. He said that his onboarding at his main employer is worse: in the best case scenario he’ll get the necessary access next week, so he spent the entire 8-hour workday today by browsing Habrahabr.
Yet I believe our pair programming and real tasks strategy looks very competitive. Yesterday <> and I were making fun of a typical onboarding in a large company like Google where you get your laptop, your task and a codebase. Then, as you barely understand what happens where, you start looking around desperately until you find that the sufficient time passed for you to ask a manager what’s the next step of figuring things out.
<> moved to Moscow today and had his first day at <>. He’s going to work with us for ¾ of full-time - on weekday evenings and weekends. He said that his onboarding at his main employer is worse: in the best case scenario he’ll get the necessary access next week, so he spent the entire 8-hour workday today by browsing Habrahabr.
Yesterday I summed up our expenses from an investment report since we raised a round. Then I divided that by our burn rate and I got a runway of 4 months only. Though <> later explained to me where my calculations are wrong and why we have a runway of 8 months, the very feeling of a short runway is a very important and sober look to what we’re making. What will happen if one day we can’t pay salaries anymore?
I’m trying to summarize and share what I was doing right for the last four months as a team lead. I name the following points:
— Start hiring
— Iterate over google docs, Trello boards and the Excel person/day task grid
— Make everyone record gifs with the new functionality
— Make everyone ship builds
— Make everyone write backend, peer review, merge and deploy
— Make everyone talk directly to product managers, get micromanagement of "what's my next task" from them and have a tight QA feedback loop
— Offload a managing role to a team of product managers while retaining 1:1 calls
— Don’t block architectural and framework decisions if they lead to faster shipping of prototypes
— Start hiring
— Iterate over google docs, Trello boards and the Excel person/day task grid
— Make everyone record gifs with the new functionality
— Make everyone ship builds
— Make everyone write backend, peer review, merge and deploy
— Make everyone talk directly to product managers, get micromanagement of "what's my next task" from them and have a tight QA feedback loop
— Offload a managing role to a team of product managers while retaining 1:1 calls
— Don’t block architectural and framework decisions if they lead to faster shipping of prototypes