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Why founder and lightning

With us,

you can

GROW

your OWN

WAY

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As Founders and business leaders ourselves, we know that part of the excitement of starting your own business is that you’re carving out your own niche in the world now. That often means putting your savings to work, re-mortgaging your house, borrowing money or otherwise taking risks with your financial future. Bringing in the wrong Co-Founders and deploying capital on the wrong things will hurt in time. This is why our approach is Founder-aligned:

Protect your runway

You’ll have lots of success metrics in mind – downloads, activations, referrals, revenue, fundraising, etc – and we’ll minimise the amount you need to spend at each stage.

Alignment with funding

A typical Founder uses personal savings for a discovery and prototype project to raise pre-seed money to build an MVP, which helps them with a seed round to build v1.0.

Stay in control

You didn’t start your own business to be told what to do by Co-Founders and Investors. Stay in charge by only bringing in the right people at the right time in the right places.

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Don’t BACK

YOURSELF

into a CORNER

Bringing in an unknown CTO as Co-Founder because you need developer help will be a mistake. As an early-stage Founder, you need to give yourself the freedom to explore all the options without committing yourself to a direction you can’t change. It seems counter-intuitive but we advise Founders to slow down, be cautious with Co-Founders, and protect your capital and equity dearly. Here’s why we think we can help you to go further, faster, for less:

  • Limit dilution

    You don’t need a co-founding CTO. Only grow in-house when it makes sense. Don’t give away equity at the wrong time for the wrong things. We help maximise return-on-exit.

  • Maximise optionality

    With every step forward you take, there should always be options to pivot or change direction going forward. Don’t lock in a pathway that may doom you to failure from the start.

  • Spend less, code later

    You don’t need to write code to build intellectual property. The value is in your product and customers, not code. Invest
    in product design and testing; wait before coding.

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Only BUILD

on strong

FOUNDATIONS

If you meet a dev agency that wants a fixed scope from you for a fixed price, be afraid. Without validated learning – about your target market, customer needs, differentiation, functionality, etc – you will be building on foundations of sand. Our approach means that are constantly testing, learning and adapting as we bring your product to life. We’ll help you to ensure that when we start building, we do so from a position of strength, which will help you to:

  • Launch products that will succeed

    We do customer discovery, problem/solution validation and rapid prototyping/testing so that we know the initial release or MVP of your product will find a market.

  • Onboard users and get to revenue

    Everything else, from hiring to fundraising, is easier once you’re winning customers and revenue is flowing. Our approach aims to get you there as fast as is feasible.

  • Iterative improvements going forward

    With us, you’ll constantly be A/B split testing, trying out new features, testing hypotheses, and seeking validated learning. That way, nothing is wasted as you grow.

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Relevant articles

Article How to hire (or not) a CTO

Event Founders Forum with Bill Morrow

Article Start with Problem Validation, NOT Solution Validation

Article Why we don't use a fixed scope

To find out more about our approach, tell us a bit about yourself, your project and what you’re looking for help with and we’ll reach out to book a call.

Contact us
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