Preface
Once you are trying to make an idea become true and be proud of yourself to make it work that well, you need to make right decisions and meet the right people to take your idea off of the blueprint.
In this personal article, I will explain how I took the ones that made my company be where we are today. So, we need to set some points:
- What makes you unique?
- Does your team believe in your idea?
- You have no money. How make your company still running? During this article I will explain how I answered each one of this three questions.
What makes you unique?
Sig was born after an idea:
Software must not look into people with more experience, once making something work says more about passion than knowledge. Everyone can learn, but you can not force anyone to fall in love with your idea
In order to follow what I wanted my startup to be based on, my first colleagues and employees were my friend that I made in college and his friend that lived in other state. They were finishing a programming school course and were also looking for an opportunity as a trainee in some small tech company in Brazil.
My first steps
At first, Sig were an agency that received freelancing jobs from another companies and had its profit shared between us three. A few days after our start, I would say in less than four days, I found our first design chief, specialized on UI/UX and with a lot more work experience than anyone in the company, he was the one that created our new visual identity.
Right after having our new team composed by 3 developers and 3 designers, our first customer and partner came: an crypto bank that were developed by a carioca developer, and we needed to help him with his mobile app visual identity and design. The owner of this bank became a personal friend of mine after our first talks, and so, he helped me sketching Sig's first remuneration model.
Sig's first steps to become a Startup
After some talks, I realized that Sig needed money to survive, so if we have not had any customers in the month, I would still paying for the developers and the company infrastructure. Said that, I booked a meeting with the entire team and built our first job description model: Each one of the components of the team that were present at that moment would have a % of the company while our idea was starting to expand, and, after some time and work model changes, their % would be changed by executive roles in the company board.
CFO enters the game
I was studying finances as fast as I could, learning about how to build up strategies to make sure that my team would be paid in day and at the same time be excited for the new projects that were coming to the startup. Then, I started to look for people that could help me managing the finances of my company, since I figured out that coding were my strong point and I should keep focusing on being a leader and improving my coding skills.
At this point, I remembered that my cousin were working at an investor consultant at XP Investimentos and I invited him to be a part of the company and take care of our finances, because I would not be able to make that work all alone.
Let us start being a Startup
After we had already our Chief of Design, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, we could really take a step forward to start being a startup.
After our first weeks with a larger team, our first big customer appeared out of the blue: now XP was our customer. We started taking some meetings with the guys from XP and it was time to bring more developers to the game, since only three of us — me as senior and my two friends that were learning their first commercial experiencies working alongside me.
Your team must be powered by an idea
At this point, my team was with almost 10 people and I needed to think how I was supposed to make their work for my idea without paying, since our contract with XP were about to start and we did not had money to hire other developers.
That was the point that made me think about a trade-off: I am going to purpose to juniors an opportunity to be close to XP team and learn with me how to be a part of a professional tech team and be prepared to be launched at the tech market when they feel they were ready. This way, my teams would be temporary but I would be helped with those guys to make my idea become true.
SCRUM or Kanbam?
Demand were coming hot and we needed to start creating boards to make sure anyone would be lost in the process and our team potential would not be wasted without a good task management.
After making some researches and also remembering what I did in the other companies I worked, this list of needs was created:
- We need a free tool
- We need a good integration with github
- We need to create sprints — so, this way I would be able to follow my juniors much closer and help them with their doubts
- We need to create a board for each project
So, we started to use JIRA. Our sprints lasted 15 days each and we had two meetings per sprint, one to be a kickoff meeting and the other one to take a look at our progress and make a general code review of the concluded tasks.
Wait... more people are coming?
More developers started to come after me asking about our project and how they could work in exchange of experiencing how it is to work on a team of professional developers. That was the moment I realized my idea was starting to be something, a lot of people were looking forward to enter in the team and we had a lot of good feedbacks since the very beginning.
Does your team believe in your idea?
After our team started expanding in a way that would be difficult for me to take look of every developer in the company, I started our new model: shared leadership.
I booked a call with my oldest developers and asked them some questions:
- Our team is much bigger that when you guys came in. Be in the team still make sense for you two? I had a positive feedback
- I need you two to help me take care of everyone in the team, this is when you become team leaders, it is OK for you two? They started to be very excited with the idea of being leaders and accepted my offer. With this conversation, I had the confidence that my team believed in my idea and they were up to anything that we would need to deal in the future. After that call, both of them started to be leaders of two teams with 3 developers each.
Our big squad
At that moment of the company, our squad had almost 12 members, 9 developers and 3 designers.
That was the moment I figured out we needed to start paying our team as fast as possible or it would start shrinking and people would become unsatisfied with the startup.
First earthquake
Our first earthquake was when my design chief needed to take a break of the company since his other job was needing too much of him because of some emergencies that happened that very same week.
After the designer dropped the team, his team of two other designers also needed to take a break so they could focus on their jobs, because they did not had their leader on the team anymore.
Putting the team together
After the shock that we had, I needed to start searching for new designers, and that was when I started searching for intelligent people at twitter.
In less than two weeks we already had our new design team, composed by three designers: our new chief of design — that showed to be so much excited to work with us and he helped me understanding more about UI/UX.
A new potential?
One of our new designers is a specialist in cognitive research and psychology applied to interfaces, and after she entered the team, I realized that our startup could finally take a step forward and stop producing just websites and start being a strong SaaS builder.
## You have no money. How make your company still running?
XP was starting to pay us and our team was on its bigger size — bigger that the team we have today.
That was when I started putting together a system of remuneration based on challenges and demand.
Sibelius Seraphini
I sent a twitter direct message to Sibelius asking for a position as trainee in Woovi in order to learn with my major inspiration in the brazilian developer community to improve my coding skills.
After a chit-chat he sent me some bounties that are running on Woovi so I could solve one of them and prove if I was really intelligent enough to enter his team.
Let me start looking for really good people
After collaborating with Woovi in some of their projects and starting to be a part of the team, I saw that Sig walks in the same path as Woovi: we want to be quick, inclusive and automatized.
And, this is when I put together our new business modal: Sig were starting to be a community-first DAO company.
Why a DAO?
I need my team to be as much engaged with the project as possible, and my solution to this issue was giving them the possibility to work as they want and when they wanted to, as long as they delivered the tasks on time, it would work just fine.
Alongside the DAO model, I started to make my startup as much horizontal as possible: I started writing more essays, more documentations and more papers so they could learn how I think and how I expect things to be done at Sig — this paper will also serve as a direction to them.
Community-first
Our discord community started to grow after Sibelius started to support Sig as a mentor and consultant. We merged our communities and his followers also started to look forward to learn more about my business model.
At this time, I am taking the next steps of the company: Enlarge our community and start to look for bounties where they can work on and feel like they are inside of the team and helping the company to climb through new levels.
Leaf
I think Leaf is the part of Sig that I am most proud of. Leaf is our technology to sustainability module, where we can build applications and services that helps the environment through green technology.
GAMBA
GAMBA — Grupo Ambientalista da Bahia is the first NGO that we worked with. Together we created a project to help native people of brazilian poor regions though geographic location applications that shoots massive alerts to different channels. You can learn more about the project at our website.
doebem
doebem is a fundraiser NGO that collects donations from people and then redirect them to other causes in the country, so this way our money is taken care by competent organizations. This project also was the one that helped us be recognized by Woovi and build a direct partnership between the startups.
My next steps
All I wanted to say its said during this article, I hope you can learn with my thoughts how to help your idea to become real and start being something real.
In the next few days, this is what I will working on:
- Woovi and OpenPix
- doebem
- Growing our community
- Being recognized for my ideas at Twitter
- Make Sig bigger and more valuable
Sig Coding
Sig is a community-first DAO startup that produces SaaS applications powered by its own community. We spend time thinking on how to make things better and how to make tech be more environment-friendly.
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