Pupilfirst Alumni Days Notes

Why work in a product based startup?

* Learning over earning when you start off. Product-based startups have a lot of opportunity for focused growth. 
* Ride the wave: Most of the good companies you hear out there are product startups, so why do you want to join someplace else?
* Follow your interest area, productivity, music, finance, et. al.
* A more healthy environment for engineers: prioritising product growth over random customer decisions. 

Decisions you make as a CTO of a company

* Depends on the stage of the company, from a small startups to larger IPO-ed companies.
* Primarily 4 things:
    * Exemplar Programmer
        * The idea is to be a 10x multiplier
        * So individual programming is ok
        * But being good at code reviews, and levering up your team is ++
    * Management: Product & Engineering
        * Engineering management
        * Team hiring and letting go of people
        * Product management, be the voice of engineering
    * Architecture: Technology lead
        * Choose boring technology
        * Steward incremental improvement 
    * Sales Engineering: Solutions Architect
        * Understand customer problems
        * Suggest how your product can help
    * Executive Reporting
        * Report progress to the CEO & the board

Choosing a stack for your SaaS

* If you are building a mobile product, unless you are really comfortable with React Native:
    * Choose the native stack for the mobile OS, Kotlin and Swift
* If you are building web:
    * Choose whatever front-end stack you are familiar with
    * Choose the backend stack you are familiar with
* DevOps
    * Choose whatever is simplest to deploy
    * Docker is good to explore
* Choose boring technology, the latest and greatest is possibly not the best.

Building an MVP

* Build a customer audience first
* Building isn’t the challenge, selling is
* Maintain an idea list

Outsourcing parts of your product

* If it’s non-core, then outsource
    * Assuming you have money
* But not to a team, but to another product
* No-code solutions

Pupilfirst LMS being Open Source

* Defer to Hari

UX & Accessibility

* Start with UX first
* Customer workflows
* Accessibility is important, but use frameworks that have accessibility built in
    * For e.g. pick a design system that has ccessibilty built in.

Deploying your SaaS Product

* Choose something that you have familiarity with
    * AWS if not
* Explore Docker