Putting together a web dev team?

[kwerk]

If you had funding and an office space and wanted to start a team to develop random startup ideas, how would you go about it? Say 3 or 4 people that can cover everything to build solid scalable website from hardware, sysadmin, database, backend dev, frontend dev, etc.

Payroll, contracts, insurance, legal and all that.
Knowing what kind of devs you actually need?
Where to find them.
How to get a good one
How much to pay them
etc etc

I suppose you would need a consultant or something first who can do all that, but then where do you find one of those?

 

[kwerk]

I can put that together, but it'd cost you about £600 per day just for me.

Before the "lolkwerks" roll in, it is a bit daft just trying to create a think tank and hope you strike gold. Actually have an idea you think will work first.

I'd also suggest as a startup you soley live on the cloud, dont invest in your own infrastructure. Developers are crap at building and maintaining hardware but they are fine at creating automated systems that can deploy to the likes of Amazon Web Services.

Well I already have a couple things I work solo on and have funding offers (well in to 6 figs) from some of my clients. It's getting too much to handle by myself now and I want to step it up a notch but barely have time to even research how to start. I want to finish off these 2 projects and then build 2 more concepts I have with the money the first are 2 are generating.

 

[kwerk]

You'd be silly to get a team together just to develop random startup ideas. Start on your own, if you get interest then start hiring. That's how a lot of these indie game developers did it.

As above, you'd be silly to get a team together just in the hope that you might strike gold.

Ignore the ideas part. I want to know the nuts and bolts of getting such a thing up and running.

Hypothetically if you had some office space, a half rack and a gigE port, and salaries for 3 people for a year... what mudane technicalities would you do next? Look in the yellow pages for a business consultant?

 

[kwerk]

"Well into 6 figs",
pmsl, that should keep you running for a good few weeks!

I work for a software startup of 8 engineers, manager and the CEO, we burn through about $1.6 million USD a year.

A standard engineer is going to be on $75-120K pa depending in area in the US. Managers are at $110-150k. You then have to pay accounts and secretarial fees.

You then typically multiple salaries by 1.5x at least to cover expenses, taxes, pension contribution, benefits, health.

Add in the lawyers and legal fees. E.g. Getting a patent can cost you $10-15K

Throw in bussiness consultants, marketing, specialist advisors, conference/trade show fees. We are having a stand at CES, getting a booth is something like $10k, we spent another $10k getting professional marketing and video promotional work.


You then have office rental, our office is $9k a month and we are in a very cheap area of the US.

I don't need engineers I need like a web/js guy, a python guy (besides myself) and maybe a lighttp/mongo or whatever admin guy. How much could that cost 50k each? The office is only $800/month with room for 4 people, inside a modern bank building, shared conference rooms, receptionists, fiber, etc. it's quite nice. Then hosting is about $600/mo for 6 servers I currently use, then $300 for sendgrid. So its less than $2000/month to run everything currently.

 

[kwerk]

Probably over thinking it. I suppose go to a business lawyer who will have boilerplate stuff for hiring/firing? Then an accountant who can do taxes/pay. Then just find some people with good portfolios who can do what I want and put it on "the cloud".

 

[kwerk]

I may be being thick here but I don't understand how you can get to a position where companies are offering you 6 figure sums, yet you have no idea how to use that?? Surely if you are working solo in the same area of work and the companies are offering you monies to expand, you would know exactly what you need to do??

They offered to buy it off me as-is and I declined, then they offered to fund me to develop it further and then buy it, so I said if you fund this other thing as well then ok. It's to do with agriculture so not exactly a hot bed of tech startups. I have pretty much captured the user base for this though so I have a bit of leverage.