The Difference Between Bad, Good, and Great Startup Engineers
+ Should Founders Continue Working on Their Startups, Virtual Demo Day for Batch W23 Is Tomorrow
We're almost half a year into 2023, and over here at Iterative, we're wrapping up the Winter 2023 batch. Demo Day is tomorrow (already!), and we're excited about our sixth batch of companies - we think this is the strongest batch yet.
In this month's newsletter, we're diving into…
The difference between bad, good, and great startup engineers
How to know if founders should continue working on their startups
The way startup ideas look vs how they actually turned out
We hope you'll like this one - feel free to skip to any sections that jump out for you.
What's the Difference Between Bad, Good, and Great Startup Engineers?
By: Hsu Ken Ooi
When given something to build…
Bad Startup Engineers
A bad startup engineer will immediately start writing code. There’s very little consideration for how it should be built. You say make a button that when pressed does X. They make a button that when pressed does X. The project will get “done” in a week but you will spend the next 3 weeks fixing bugs and have to re-write it again in 3 months.
Good Startup Engineers
A good startup engineer will consider how to build it but only in the most elegant, scalable, highest quality way possible. It will be a work of art but it will take a month to build and be complete overkill.
Recent Computer Science graduates are often like this. They learned all the theory and can’t wait to put all of it to use. And by all, I mean all of it.
Great Startup Engineers
A great startup engineer will ask for context. Why are we building this? What are we trying to accomplish by building it? How do we know if it’s successful? After getting the appropriate amount of context, they will think about it for few hours and come back with options on how to build it. Typically those options will include the following..
1. Fast But Low Quality – If we cut corners, we can get it done in 3 days with minimal bugs but it’s not that extensible so if X happens, we’ll have to re-write it but I don’t expect X to happen for another 3 months.
2. Slow But High Quality – If we do it the “right” way, it’ll take us 3 weeks but we’ll never have to re-write it again. It’ll be extensible and scalable from the beginning.
3. Moderate and Moderate Quality – If we cut the right corners, we can get it done in a week. It’s relatively extensible and scalable. We might have to make improvements at some point but that shouldn’t be for at least a year.
These are the best engineers. With them, you feel like anything is possible and start dreaming even bigger.
Why Are They So Valuable?
At a large company, the product has been mostly figured out. Engineers are mostly focused on scale and extensibility. At a startup, it’s the opposite. The most important thing for a startup, and by extension the engineers at the startup, is iteration speed. Sometimes people interpret that as engineers who get things done quickly through hacky code and lots of bugs. More often than not, that actually decreases your iteration speed because you end up spending so much time fixing bugs. In the worst case, it’s hard to tell if people want what you built because it’s so buggy.
To increase iteration speed, a startup needs to find the right balance between speed and quality of code. It’s not just about cutting corners, it’s knowing which corners to cut and how.
Next Round of Final Interviews in 2 Weeks
Applications are open - and we're on the lookout for the next companies to invest in. We invest up to $500K and work with founders closely for three months to help them grow further. We've helped these companies get to the next level:
Spenmo (Singapore) raised $34M at Demo Day and then $85M less than a year later
Propseller (Singapore) recently raised a $12M Series A
GoZayaan (Bangladesh) has raised $7.2M since the program
The next batch is scheduled to start in July this year, and we're already doing final interviews - the next round happens in two weeks.
Recommend a Founder to Iterative
Not working on something but know someone that is? We'd love to hear from them - recommend someone for our next batch. At Iterative, we take recommendations seriously. Often, we're betting on the founders more than the idea, so we love hearing from people who know them well or have worked with them before.
We're always looking for companies to invest in, so if you know anyone who's working on a cool idea, send them our way.
Ideas from Iterative
Should You Continue Working on Your Startup?
It's a persistent question founders ask themselves - and the most difficult to answer. Should you keep going? When do you know it's time to move on? How do you even bring the topic up to your co-founders?
In our (first ever!) episode of the Brian and Hsu Ken show, they share more on…
Why This Question Is Hard for Founders
Brian shares why founders tend to avoid talking about this topic, given that it goes against everything a founder is expected to do.
“It is exactly the opposite of the 'best’ attributes of entrepreneurs. The best attributes of most entrepreneurs are to stick it out, be super gritty, persevere, and [asking this question] is going against that nature. It's also incredibly tied to your own ego, which makes it doubly hard to have these conversations.”
Hsu Ken thinks imposter syndrome plays a part, especially since startup books and news only cover the companies that found success after toughing it out.
“You feel like you should stick it out more, because you hear all these stories [about founders persevering] and you think that's what founders are supposed to do. Which is tricky, because the media doesn't write about stories like these. Stories of companies that stuck it out for 5 years and they didn't turn out into anything, when there's actually more cases like these.”
Signs You Should Continue Your Startup
Hsu Ken and Brian expand on the three questions to ask yourself when answering the question of “Should I Continue?”
1. Are You Growing?
“Are you growing sufficiently fast? Growth is the best indicator that you're onto something. You're looking for demand for your product, and demand comes in the form of growth. How fast is fast depends on your company stage, and in our batch, we try to get 5% - 7% every week.”
2. Are You Learning?
“One of the things we look for when we're talking to founders is: are they telling us things that we haven't heard, or things that they've learned building their companies? It's a good signal of whether a startup is going to be successful, because founders that have the most insights (they're learning the most from their customers) just continue to learn in that pace.”
3. Do You Have Ideas on What To Do Next?
“One of the best signals to look for to shut down your company is you've now run out of ideas for how to sufficiently solve a problem. And it's a good signal because it's really clear - you're exhausted, you're scrapping the bottom of the barrel - and you have no inspiration anymore.”
4. Are You Having Fun?
“When you're having fun, you're learning quickly. When you're having fun, you're trying all these things and you get results. A lot of times, even when you're trying things and they don't pan out, you still learned something and it's still fun.”
Watch the full episode here.
Is Your Startup Idea a Good Idea?
It's hard to know if an idea is actually a good idea. There are times when something looks like a good idea, but it's actually a bad idea. And then there are sometimes when something looks like a bad idea, but it's actually a good idea.
What happens then?
In this video, Hsu Ken explains how he thinks about the relationship between the way startup ideas look compared to how they actually turned out.
Watch the video here.
Spotlight on Founders
Congratulations Team Zi.Care on Their $3M Raise
Zi.Care (Iterative S21), an Indonesian healthtech company, has raised $3M in Series A funding to expand its market coverage in the country.
Zi.Care focuses on electronic medical records (EMR), and the product is supported by Indonesia’s Ministry of Health and Ministry of Information & Communication. Today, it works with over 100 hospitals across the country - the team got $1.3 million in revenues in the first half of 2022 alone.
Congratulations Jodi Pujiyono Susanto, Jessy Abdurrahman, Sanjaya I. Mayluddin and team Zi.Care!
Read more about the funding news here.
In the Loop
Investors, You're Invited to Iterative's Virtual W23 Demo Day
Our Virtual Demo Day for our Winter 2023 batch is tomorrow, on Wednesday, 3 May at 10 am (SGT). If you're an investor and have not previously attended Demo Day before, register here.
Our first batch started in June 2020, and since then, we have invested in over 80+ companies with a collective value that is now worth $1.2 billion. These include Spenmo, CoderSchool, GoZayaan and Propseller.
You can find the full list of the companies in the registration link. This event is only open for investors.