Case Studies | Jeanine Jue

Okay, case studies. Oh, this is fun. Okay, these are true stories, and I can't tell you who the companies are, so I have to keep— it's so tempting, but this is being recorded too. And no, I'm still in touch with the founders too, so I have to be careful. I don't advise for this one anymore though. Okay, so Startup X, they have a web solution, mobile Android, iOS, but for their other parts of the clients, so the Android iOS app isn't gonna be used that much. So it's not even worth it. So primary usage is with the web solution. So they have one mobile engineer, just got out of college, iOS, one year experience, one frontend developer, doesn't know that many frontend stuff, is fluent in Adobe Photoshop, one full-time QA engineer, And a CTO who handles backend engineering doesn't have any management experience at all. Now again, you don't need to have the management experience. Okay, well, as you know, the startup failed. So this is when I run, right? 'Cause I'm like, yeah, you're not going anywhere. So actually the founder's like, Janine, I need you to sit down and talk to my team. I don't know what's going on. They're not delivering stuff and I'm not getting— I'm like, all right, fine. And I told them, I always tell the CEOs, I'm like, I cannot have you in the room when I'm talking to them. So I talked to the mobile engineer, the frontend developer. Mobile engineer, well, this was the guy, he actually wanted to do Node.js, and their backend was Node.js. I'm like, okay, well that's— I'm like, what else is gonna make you happy? What's going on? He's like, well, there's no collaboration, and all this other stuff. They didn't have tools. It's like, okay, use Bugzilla, all this other stuff. So these are the things that were put in place. It still failed anyway. And the reason why it failed is because of the code base itself. It was an absolute mess. The front-end developer is still kind of junior and just was doing Photoshop stuff. They didn't need this person full-time for the skill set, so I actually got her a job at another company because it was a waste of the company resources. The QA engineer, again, waste of time. He ended up having to do product management work. In order to make up for the time. But as you can see, with a small amount of funding, they're really just— they're losing a lot of money. And the CTO and the CEO is still collecting salary as well. And the CTO not wanting to interact, so after that whole experience of a couple of months, it's like, yes, get them excited, get them motivated, but it wasn't gonna work. And what else? But again, as a startup founder, you gotta make tough decisions. You gotta fire somebody, you gotta do it. And again, I'm not saying to be cold or anything. I mean, with that front-end developer, I said, hey, here's another job, I'm gonna help you. And it's nothing personal. Go ahead.

In this scenario, what would you have done differently? Because it sounds like they had a lot of people working on it who you didn't think that they needed for people from these different backgrounds. What would you have done differently?

With $500,000 worth of funding, I would have first of all not I would have actually outsourced. I don't want to talk about outsourcing because I know you're having another talk on that. So let's say skip the outsourcing, because early stages I would outsource. It's cheap for me. But let's say I have no money and I can't do that. So with something like this, forget about outsourcing for now. What I would do, first of all, I'd make it a hybrid solution. If nobody's going to use my mobile app, then why am I having native iOS and Android? It doesn't make any sense. Let me just have one code base for both platforms. Boom, done. But considering the technology, it did have to be an iPhone/Android app, considering it did have to. What I would do, I'd hire somebody who had experience building hybrid apps. Probably, I think at this stage, since it wasn't— and this is the thing too, so you're looking at somebody with You're looking at a company that needs a hybrid kind of app developer. You don't need that much experience because primary usage is the web solution. So I would invest more money on the engineering side in terms of the web solution. So I'd have one mobile engineer, I would have a full-stack developer, and I would also have— I mean, and again, the CEO and CTO are collecting money. And for the CTO, work with the full-stack engineer. I think that would be a good first step with that kind of funding. Because another reason, I think that was the second reason too, why startups fail, they run out of money. And this is because they're just not really careful. Any questions? And would anyone do anything differently? Let's talk to the engineers in the room. What would you do different? No? Anything? For this one specifically?

Yeah. I mean, if you're doing a web solution, having only one backend engineer would probably be a mistake. I would have had at least someone else in addition to the CTO.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

And then, like you said, if you would have just made a backend API, you probably could use it with both Android and iOS.

Yeah.

So the same thing. Here's another one. This person actually got a friends and family round of $200K. I'm sorry, my friends and family, I mean, my grandmother sends me a $25 check. I can't imagine getting that much funding from my family. So this was primarily mobile-based fintech, 2 backend engineers. Oh, this is where the developer died. Okay, that's fun. 2 backend engineers, one in Ruby and the other in Java. I was there in the beginning phases too. One lightweight coder, and I didn't screen that coder. I found out later on. I should say developer. One lightweight developer. I still don't even know what the experience is. One CEO and no CTO. Okay, problems. This is fun. Okay, the developer, the master one died, so they didn't have a process in place in terms of What are the requirements? What's the scope of work? It was just like, okay, let's plug in these APIs. Let's see what happens.

The Ruby or the Java one that passed away?

Yeah, they ended up going with Ruby. It was the Ruby one that passed away. And so the other one only knew Java. And so, yeah, and then you have a lightweight coder, little experience. And yeah, 'cause I remember he was like, I can't figure out this API. I'm like, are you kidding? There's sample code, copy and paste. And then I realized just, It's tough. And so the CEO, he started micromanaging. He didn't see deliverables. And there was no sprint, no schedules. We had 1-hour meetings every week, and they just weren't good. But I think the pain point with that— they're still going. They're still moving along. But I think the pain point is just recovering from the death of one of their teammates. And again, not having that knowledge transfer. Go ahead. Were they paying the live people? Who?

Or was it their, like, them No, they were paid. Yeah.

Who was paid?

The lightweight coder?

Oh yeah, yeah, he was paid. Very little. I don't have the numbers on that. I mean, I think the lightweight coder was getting more equity than salary. But the 2 backend engineers, they were getting more salary and less equity. And as an advisor, I only get equity.

And if you were to do it again, how much money It's because of where I'm from, that people do the work for free if they you really come with a good idea.

Yeah.

From will please say work with you.

Yeah. Oh, so. In other words, developers working for free. I mean, you can find that, but you're gonna find developers like me who are just very expensive for— See, and that's the beauty of it.

No equity?

OK, now that's crazy right there. OK, you've got to give me their contact info because I'm just going to open my own dev shop, right?

They're students, so it's like, oh, they're doing an internship class and Google would recommend them. I have like 12.

Oh, so kind of like projects, like internships. Dr.— yeah.

Do you have someone reviewing their code?

Yeah, yeah.

They have code reviews? Do you sit in on those code reviews? Yeah, that's good. That's really good.

Wow.

Yeah. They're getting experience working with us.

That's what they're getting.

I wouldn't pay them much.

Right, but at the same time, let's say you had some funding. You were held accountable for that funding. Because let's say my dad gave me $200,000. Yeah, right. If I screwed that up, I'd never hear the end of it. But yeah. But it depends on how critical your product is. Again, like in financial technology, there's so many unicorns going out there, so many competitors going out there as well. So it depends on what your timeline is. Like a lot of companies are like, God, a lot of startups, 3 to 6 months. They have to launch immediately. So it depends, but that's great though, you get free coders. Dr. Kevin Carroll over at St. Mary's, he's actually working on— I got 5 minutes left. He actually works with a professor in computer science, I believe at UCSF. And he had them build out these solutions to help people with cognitive gains, to help people with cognitive issues who have MS. So yeah, I mean, that is another great thing, getting students to do it. But again, I've seen situations where after a year they have some junior developers building it out, and then, oh God, we can't scale it, we have to toss it. And that's what happened with a colleague of mine, built something out, She actually had over 100,000 users. I was really impressed. She had to throw away the whole backend. She told me to take a look at it, and it was hybrid. Performance was bad. There was a lot of heavy traffic on that app as well. So we had to toss it, and we just did native iOS and Android. So she lost some money, but we actually outsourced it. I have this outsourcing team I swear by, and I worked with them for 5 years to pick up some of the stuff. to help me with the cleanup, and they only charged like $20,000 to build iOS and Android. But I mean, that's great though to use students too. Let me see. Oh, one more. Oh, this is really funny. I love this, I swear. I wish I had like a reality show, like a camera, because when I talked to this CEO, he invested like a few hundred thousand dollars in this, and he was like, Jeanine, they're coming out, the international developers, they're stealing my idea. Yeah, everybody thinks you're stealing your idea. That's not true. And things were not getting delivered on time, everything like that. So I told him, okay. I was on a call with him, I listened, and they were giving the tech talk gibberish. In other words, talking all this gibberish that he couldn't understand and it didn't make any sense as well. So I told the CEO to stay off the call. And what was it? Found out the developers were really pissed off. They— what was he doing? He was talking to the developers.

Changing requirements.

Changing requirements last minute. Product would never get completed, 'cause right when you're about to complete, oh no, you're gonna have to toss that and do that. He micromanaged, had an hour meeting every day. Where are you at? Why didn't you fix this? You just gave it to me yesterday. Developers were burnt out. They didn't give a crap, so they were just half-assing it. And 1-hour calls, and they didn't care. And that's a dangerous situation. Because they have no respect for the CEO. So you try to build that up. What do you do? It's like, okay, I can come in and manage it, but it's really hard to rebuild up that trust because you already have that bad taste in your mouth. So yeah, I stopped talking to him after a little while. And then I told him too. I said, hey, listen, dude, that's not the way you manage a team. Developer case study. Developer has a cool feature outside of the scope of the project, forgot to do the main project, You have a patch that has to get out because the app is crashing in the store. Again, you want to yell at them, and you don't. Great job. We'll put that in the next release, even though it really is not going to contribute to the success of our product, but you don't say that. Then you just get them to focus back. Give them the tools, and just be on them without micromanaging. Okay, so I only have 5 minutes left, 3 minutes left, so I'm just going to throw out a few quick tips. And I mean, I could talk about this forever. There's just so much I've learned through my experiences. Assess your engineering team right now. If you have an engineering team of 2, 3 people, is there conflict, lack of focus, poor performance? And again, if you've got to clean house, you've got to do it. This is a startup. You could be on that 90% if you don't clean house now. Determine what main priorities are. Advisors, if you have any, to assess your engineering team. Get a second opinion. Is there a strong process in place? Again, not too much process, but enough to give the developers structure. If you're building a new engineering team, do another assessment. Consult with a technical advisor. I'm a huge advocate for advisors. If I was to do a startup again, I would have a technical advisor because I certainly would want to have that second opinion. And prepare a super passionate description of your job. There are some developers who will work for free. Well, for equity as well. Include how they can make a difference and start recruiting and reaching out online. Thank you.