Comments on: What are the biggest challenges of building a tech company outside of Silicon Valley?

By: Maurice Koks

Maurice Koks — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 01:19:16 +0000

Interesting Topic and yes Colorado, Rhode Island or any place is fine i guess as long as you are Happy. I mean I started wrestling with a software development project out of a my Cigar Factory in the Dominican Republic, how crazy is that. But as you said Alex the benefits of living your life in the place you want far outweigh the challenges. And who told you that investors don’t like the island breeze, with cocktails on the beach.

By: Kamal

Kamal — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 16:15:12 +0000

Hi Alex, I started a startup where all of our software development is done in — of all the places in the world – Lahore, Pakistan. We went there because I once hired some developers from there through the free-lancing website called Upwork. They did a great job in developing native iOS and android apps so that’s what got me started. Low cost was also very attractive. But in my experience it is not important where you are located (Silicon Valley or NYC or Lahore) but where can you find the talent pool that can deliver on what you are trying to do. We develop a healthcare related software that requires .Net, AngularJS, some PHP, a lot of Ionic, and some other process related technologies such as Git, Travis, SQL Servers etc. so we can find people with these skills in Pakistan. But if we were developing big-data analyzers, artificial intelligence, or devising smart searching algorithms then I probably wouldn’t be there. Then I WILL focus on Eastern Europe or may be Silicon valley. Silicon Valley gives you an ecosystem that is in place for you to help you. Other places may not be operating at that same level.

To conclude, I try to find developers with certain traits: how much they know about what’s going on in the specific platform (angular js, react, ember, Ionic)? or the area they focus on (front-end/back-end)? how resourceful they are and which tools they use? Basically just try to see how hungry they are and how do they seek?

I enjoy your blogs and now becoming a regular reader.

By: Mike Sudyk

Mike Sudyk — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:44:42 +0000

As a software services business we are in process of launching our first SaaS offering and struggling to learn the business/market side. We are in Grand Rapids MI and the one thing that is lacking in the region is a group of people that have figured out the marketing and sales side of a SaaS business. We have a ton of software services businesses and they do great work but launching products is not something anyone has done with a great deal of success. Yes, there are online forums and such but having a group locally to talk with and discuss is very valuable. This was something I found extremely valuable when attending the Business of Software conference in Boston. A huge group of SaaS practitioners. Not theory, real world advice.

By: James McBryan

James McBryan — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 15:41:18 +0000

What exit strategies are you planning for your company? Is acquisition in mind? And if so what are you doing different to make your company more acquirable? If that exit strategy is not in mind, what is then?