Startup engineering

Advisor equity is typically 0.1% to 1% over 2 years with monthly vesting and no cliff (the FAST template from Founder Institute is the standard). Employee equity is 0.05% to 2% over 4 years with a 1-y

A technical due diligence report is a structured assessment that tells an acquirer or investor whether the engineering side of a company is worth the price on the term sheet. It covers nine areas: arc

You build a landing page in 1 day with v0 by spending one focused 8-hour block: 1 hour writing a brief, 2 hours generating and iterating the first draft in [v0.dev](https://v0.dev), 2 hours polishing

You build a marketplace MVP solo by killing the chicken-and-egg problem on day one: pick one side, fake the other side manually, and ship a single-sided product that looks like a marketplace to your f

A startup incident response process needs five things: a severity ladder (SEV1/SEV2/SEV3), a rotating incident commander even if you only have three engineers, a dedicated `#incidents` Slack channel,

MVP feature scoping means deleting every feature where the answer to "would the product still work without this?" is yes. Sort what's left into must / should / could / won't, ship only the musts, and

Working with a [remote developer in a different timezone](/blog/manage-remote-developer-non-technical) hinges on three rules: design the week around your overlap window (zero, partial, or full), defau

Bootstrap startup engineering in 2026 means three rules: pick a boring stack you can run for $50/month until $50k ARR, ship the smallest possible MVP yourself before hiring anyone, and treat AI as a j

Customer development as a non-technical founder means running 20 to 30 unstructured interviews with people who have the problem you think you're solving, before you write a line of code. You ask about

A product roadmap as a non-technical founder is a one-page document that lists the **themes** you're betting on this quarter, the next, and later. Not features. Not dates. Themes like "make signup con

A clear engineering job spec is a one-page document that names the problem you are solving, the day-1 deliverables, the tech stack, the decision authority the role carries, and the weekly compensation

A Series A engineering hiring plan should add 5 to 8 engineers over 12 months (taking a team from 3-7 to 10-15), defer the first VP Eng hire by 6 to 9 months, and weight 80% of new headcount toward se

You ship from idea to revenue in 90 days by splitting the quarter into six two-week sprints: weeks 1-2 are problem interviews and a landing page, 3-4 are the MVP build, 5-6 are a closed beta with 5 to

The most common founder mistakes when hiring developers are: skipping the paid trial, weighing the resume more than the trial work, paying in equity instead of cash, hiring before writing a PRD, and t

To talk to engineers as a non-technical founder, lead every conversation with the **what** and the **why**, not the **how**. Describe the user problem in plain English, name the success metric, and le

Validate a consumer app idea in 30 days by running four cheap signals in parallel before you write any native code: a landing page with a waitlist, three TikTok or Reels content tests, a Reddit demand

A product requirements document (PRD) as a non-technical founder is a short, plain-English brief that tells an engineer what to build, who it's for, how you'll know it worked, and what's explicitly ou

Manage a remote developer when you can't code by judging progress through working demos, not status updates. Set a daily 5-minute Loom standup, a weekly Friday retro, and use Linear plus GitHub as you

Hire a contractor for your first engineer if you are pre-product-market-fit and the scope is "ship and iterate for 8 to 16 weeks." Hire full-time only once you have paying customers, a roadmap that re

To evaluate a developer's GitHub as a non-technical founder, ignore the green-square contribution graph and look at four things: their pinned repos (do the READMEs read like a human wrote them), their

To manage multiple freelance developers without burning out, run async-first operations with a written code ownership matrix, daily Loom check-ins instead of meetings, a 30-minute weekly retro, and cl

The biggest red flags when hiring a freelance developer are: no public code (no GitHub, no portfolio repo, no live URL you can poke at), vague timelines without weekly milestones, refusing a paid tria

To choose a CMS for your startup marketing site, match the tool to who edits the site weekly. If that's a non-technical founder, pick Webflow or Framer. If it's an engineer, pick Astro plus MDX or San

Your first 5 customers should be **pulled-from-you, not pushed**: they should find you (through a tweet, a Slack post, a friend's intro) and ask to buy before you have a polished product. They should

Hire a fractional CTO when you need senior technical judgment 5 to 15 hours a week and don't yet own a roadmap that justifies a full-time hire. Hire a full-time CTO when you've crossed product-market

Handle scope creep as a founder by writing the scope down before any work starts, defining what is explicitly out of scope, and routing every new request through a written change-log with a cost and a

If you are a SaaS founder selling to EU customers, the short answer is: under €10,000/year in cross-border B2C revenue you can charge your home-country VAT rate and ignore the rest; above that, you mu

A startup waitlist converts when you treat it as a funnel (visitor to signup to activation to paid), not a vanity counter. Aim for 15-35% visitor-to-signup on a one-field email form, build the referra

To set up a cookie banner the right way, block all non-essential cookies until the visitor opts in (for EU traffic) or gives an easy opt-out path (for California traffic), pick a consent management pl

To find a technical advisor for your startup, ask three or four investors and engineering-heavy founders in your network for one warm intro to an ex-CTO who shipped in your exact vertical. Scope the r

Hire your first engineer when you are shipping at least monthly, the founder has become the only thing blocking the next release, and you have at least 12 months of runway after the offer. Earlier tha

To interview a developer when you can't code, run a 60-minute structured call (15 minutes history, 30 minutes project drilldown, 15 minutes scenario), pay a senior engineer friend or consultant $300 t

To prepare for technical due diligence as a founder, ship six artifacts in the two weeks before the data room opens: an `ARCHITECTURE.md`, an updated `README`, a `CLAUDE.md`, a clean dependency report

To validate a marketplace idea before building, run 30 supply-side interviews and 30 demand-side interviews, then operate a manual concierge marketplace in one zip code for two to four weeks. If you c

A term sheet is the 2-3 page non-binding offer from a VC that locks in valuation, dilution, board control, and liquidation rights. Read every section, model the dilution math yourself, and pay a start

Shipping to the App Store as a solo founder takes about two weeks of calendar time and $99 if you already have a working iOS build. The hard parts are not Apple's paperwork. They are the App Privacy m

To use Cursor as a non-technical founder, install Cursor, pick a tiny first scope (one page, one button, one outcome), prompt in full English with the goal and constraints, run the result locally, the

To scope a B2B SaaS MVP, narrow to one ICP persona, one workflow, and one pain. Pick a wedge feature small enough to ship in 8 to 10 weeks. Sign 3 to 5 design partners at a discount before you write c

To manage developers as a non-technical founder in 2026, run a four-loop operating system: a one-pager spec per ticket, a 5-minute async update each morning, a 30-minute Friday demo call, and a weekly

B2B SaaS customer onboarding is the engineered path from signup to the activation event, the single in-product action that predicts long-term retention. The fastest teams hit time-to-value in 2-5 minu

To negotiate developer equity, treat the offer like a financial instrument, not a gift. Ask for the option count, strike price, post-money valuation, and your fully diluted percentage in writing. Benc

Founder mode for technical product oversight in 2026 means staying deep in the product without writing code yourself. You PR-review with Claude Code's review mode against a written spec, run a 30-minu

Give a true technical co-founder 20% to 50%, most often 40% to 50% if they join at idea stage and work full-time on ramen pay. Give a first technical hire 1% to 5% pre-seed, 0.5% to 2% at seed, 0.25%

The questions to ask a developer before hiring them split into four buckets: technical depth, AI-native fluency, team fit, and red flag detectors. Skip the trivia and the warm-up filler. Ask for stori

Yes, but only enough to ship a v0/v1 yourself. In 2026, "learn to code" means roughly two months of focused work to reach AI-assisted literacy: SQL, Git, Cursor or Claude Code, one language, and basic

To hire your first CTO as a non-technical founder, work a 14-item checklist: validate the business, write a one-page spec, source through warm intros, vet on communication first and code second, run t

You can build an MVP in 2 weeks with AI tools by scaffolding a Next.js app with v0 or Bolt on day 1, building daily in Cursor and Claude Code, and wiring Supabase, Stripe, and Resend before you deploy

Bootstrap if your TAM is small-to-medium, your gross margins are high, founder-led sales work, and your market has no winner-take-all dynamic. Raise if you need a true land grab, real network effects,

A freemium pricing strategy works when three things are true: your product has a huge total addressable market, your marginal cost per free user is near zero, and there's a clear upgrade trigger that

A startup MVP checklist in 2026 is a 28-day milestone list, not a feature list. Day 1 ship a deployed landing page. Day 7 wire auth and a database. Day 14 ship the core flow with billing. Day 28 land