Challenges of different companies

For pre-seed startups

Having a demo-able mobile app at hand can help in one of 2 ways:

  1. He can put it in front of potential customers and get early traction.
  2. He can go to VCs and show a real product that can scale up with their funding.

Downward spiral

No Proof-of-Concept (PoC) -> Slim chance of funding

No funding -> Can't hire more talent/Can't scale product

Can't scale product -> Can't reach next milestone

For post funding startups

Each hire is critical and can make/break the company. Engineering and technology may be hard but culture misfits are even harder.

Stagnation

Existing customers are excited to see more. The startup can't hire to keep up with customer demand. Customer issues pile up. Or the customers lose interest and realize that they can write their own tools and they move on.

Core Business

There are projects that aren't the core product but are peripherals and important for the overall health of the company. These can be farmed off to specialists

Mid-sized or Profitable companies

Companies at this stage are doing well. They have needs to maintain some projects as they chop and change their internal software tech stack. Or they may have interest in exploring projects that may indicate what their next step should be.

Costs and team interests

The existing team may not have the expertise to handle the tech stack migration and need a boost from a team that can share this workload.

Given the short term timeline, hiring a full-time engineer/s is more expensive than contracting a team.

Areas of passion

Medical devices, Implants, Neuroscience

ClimateTech, InclusiveTech, Food/Agtech

Edtech, Healthtech

Ideation Phase Startup

Subbu is a medical doctor who has an interesting idea. His idea is solid but he is not a software developer. Subbu is anxious about going to meetups and startup events because the networking tends to be hit-or-miss. Even the hits don't necessarily share the passion for the idea

Subbu would rather not tread the delicate balance between finding the perfect founding team and real progress that can help in fundraising. After all, with the funds in hand, he can scale up the team. He contacts Astute Crew LLC to get the job done.

Seed - to - Series B Startup

Omar is a co-founder in a Series-A startup. Even though his company hired fantastic talent, he has a need to implement a new feature or refactor an existing feature. He'd like his employees to focus on their core interests but also needs to make progress on this other thing.

Omar knows from his past gigs that hiring is a delicate matter with make/break ramifications in team culture and future direction/revenue/traction. He'd rather hire smart generalist problem solvers even if slowly. Omar contracts Astute Crew LLC and scopes the project with them.

Mid-sized company

Emily is an Engineering Director in a mid-sized company. Her company has a sticky data migration project from all in one relational database to analytics related data into NoSQL databases. And to add to this, there is a lot of legacy code in C# and they'd also like to start carving out the code and spin up new microservices in Go and Python.

All of her teams are occupied with their roadmaps and this is also a one-off effort. She'd love great quality work but also is cost conscious. So she wants to carefully decide what to do.

She likes Astute Crew's ability to take up projects from abstract, one-liner statements to hardcore development and deployment with ease is a relief because she already has a lot to coordinate.