overwhelmed by developers

This is a true story that cost me 3 months delay in launching my product and almost $1,500. Read it carefully, as I don’t want it to happen to any of you out there.

It all started with 2 on time delivered contracts so, I started to trust him. Then I propose him to work on a tech tool that helps local restaurants to give access to their customers to order online via Facebook Messenger

We agreed on the terms and the price per hour but we did not sign a contract right then because I trusted him and I expected that we would do the legal work a bit later.

Lesson no 1: never start something without signing a contract. It does not matter how much trust you have in that person, just sign a contract and your life will be easier.

The things were going really good and by the middle of March I could see a live dashboard and the user interface created. I was so excited that in couple of weeks I will get to test it with real users.

But…it happend, end of March, I would not have any contact from him. It was like we talk today and scheduled​ a Skype for tomorrow but you never show up on that Skype meeting.

1, 2, 3 days passed and I started to worry about him. I was thinking that something may have happened to him. One week later, he just sent a message “let’s talk Saturday morning”. We actually did, he apologized and I thought, that’s it, sometimes things happen, let’s get over it.

He gave me a new deadline for the final beta and a date when I could move to the testing phase. But it happened again, and again and again.

Deadlines over deadlines, Skype meetings proposed by him but he would never show up.

I started to worry, it was late April and for a month we did not have anything. What could I do? Apart from emailing or calling him, nothing.

He would get all my emails, read them, but no reply, he would see all my phone calls (sometimes dozens a day) but nothing.

All of this till a day my fiancé called him and he answered. I understood that he was going though a tough time but will get in contact with me the other day.

Lesson no 2: always have somebody that knows everything about how you feel, what your concerns are, and so on. Having a partner whether is your best friend, girlfriend, fiancé to whom you always can talk no matter whatever happens is priceless

As a startup founder your will go through a lot of pain, especially mental-emotional pain. Things are not going to work the way you planned it. Whatever strong you are, you have to have somebody that is close to you, supporting you no matter.

He did get in touch with me and he promised that he will send to me all the work done so far and help another developer to take over. But eventually he did not and I stepped out of it very angry but with some priceless lessons learned.

Lesson no 3: always require from your developer to upload the source code on a platform you are admin to, every single time he changes something. I started to use bitbucket.org for that.

When you have never worked with a developer before you have no idea what to ask from him. You know the requirements of your future product, how you would like it to look but nothing about code backup, server, etc.

So, it was extremely terrible knowing that your past 3–4 months were basically wasted by a person you trusted so much. If only I could not see that 80% of the product being done, it would have been way different.

The sad truth is that he did not care and even a bit over a month after all of this, he did not say a word.

Lesson no 4: fail fast. recover 10x times faster.

It took me a week to realize that he is not going to send me anything. I paused for a moment and I said “I believe in this product and in order to get it done I need to start looking for another developer”.

That was a totally new journey and I discovered some other essential lessons that helped my to build a bootstrapped tech product. I will keep this for a future post, so make sure you follow me or subscribe down.

Closing up with:

Lesson no 5: find a developer adviser as soon as possible.

When you start your own business you don’t always have time to learn skills from 0 to 10 so you must be quick in finding solutions.

Best way to find a developer adviser is to search through your friends list on Facebook. I did find one and I am so thankful because he helped me avoid some other huge mistakes.

You don’t need a top-notch developer. Just find somebody that has been coding for at least a year and knows some stuff about servers, hosting and stuff like that.