Douglas

Developer and business developer. Has an idea and is open to joining one.

Portsmouth, NH, USAOn FounderCloud since 2021

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About

I have been a part of a few smaller startups; one company was an algae algae company where I spearheaded research initiatives, and the second was a hockey stick company. I would fit into the technical category , as I have experience building/deploying products using common web frameworks ( Ruby on Rails, and Django), as well as developing in Java ( driver development, and enterprise Spring applications). Finally I have AWS experience both with deploying my own applications, as well as working with a large company's infrastructure.

In addition to any technical knowledge, I have also worked some some finance ( keeping the books, developing financial models), and some business development e.g Lean startup, Steve Blank etc. My weakest area…

What Douglas is building

The idea

Ice Hockey can be frustrating for players (or teams) to find games, and for venues to manage ice time. Players can run into problems (often traveling far distances) to find that no one is skating that day, or the games are at capacity. Rinks cost a lot of money per hour to maintain, so unused ice time is costing these venues a good deal of money.

Introducing Gametime sports: I have created a two-sided marketplace to bring players of the game, and venues together in one, easy-to-use , robust platform.

This product is an Airbnb for Ice Hockey Rinks. Users are able to search for venues, create a profile, book games, pay online, check availability calendars, and even bid on…

OtherBuilding

Answers in the Nest

Finding a developer to pick up where we left off“Without looking at the source code, lets assume your previous developer adhered to best practices. Also assuming you have good test coverage, a good CI/CD pipeline, and it is deployed on a platform like AWS - it should be relatively straight forward to keep the existing product and continue to add features. Perhaps some patterns might need to be modified, but overall I would save time and keep what you have. I would personally only re-write an entire platform if I was moving away from a MVP (ruby on rails) and desiring to move to Java Spring for a more professional setup. As I recall, Airbnb started on Ruby on rails and eventually moved to Java for the backend, and a JS framework for the front end after they had grown and had full dev teams.”Why does it seem EVERYONE is looking for a CTO?“I have several thoughts, in bulleted points ( in true engineer form): - Its a supply/demand problem. not many CTO's are available because getting to that level requires a ton of skill and time. - Folks who can build, deploy and manage engineering teams are already getting paid boatloads of money, so pulling them away from their current job is difficult. - Outsource at your own peril. I have seen codebases from other countries, and good luck hiring developers in-house and expect them to start building from said code base right away. Without a close connection between your product team and developers, I would expect divergences in desired outcomes. And...good luck pivoting especially if english is not the primary language of the dev team. In the one example code base that I had to work on, I would sooner start from scratch than try to cobble together a solution based on a poorly written codebase. - Everyone has ideas. hardly anyone can build them from start to finish. For a business idea I had, I both developed the business model/financials and coded the entire platform from scratch. I can confidently tell you the idea is worth maybe 2% of the entire effort I put in. Of course this changes as business development needs grow, but as far as the actual product is concerned, IE an MVP, actually building it is infinity harder than coming up with the idea. " it seems many founders believe the missing ingredient to a successful launch is finding a person to do some programming or IT-heavy undertaking. " In summary , yes if you want to demonstrate a product than you need someone to build it. It is that simple. If I was a prospective investor of a tech company, I would ask myself "why hasn't this team prioritized hiring solid technical talent?".”