Do you feel stuck in your personal growth as a small startup CTO? | Hacker News Reader

Do you feel stuck in your personal growth as a small startup CTO?

7 pointsxueyongg7 comments

Context: have been in the grind for the last 3 years

I'm CTO over at https://skatespot.com -- we're about 3.5 years into development. Our app is finally live (we pivoted from pwa to native mobile apps using expo/react because maps weren't very accurate in browsers). It's been slow but now we are focusing on growth.

> because maps weren't very accurate in browsers

Could you expand on that? That sounds like an odd reason to pivot to native. Isn't accuracy determined by the data and or the projection system you're using?

so doing a pwa we used openmaps and the gps was not very accurate for slow moving objects, (ie: skateboarding). THe native apps using google maps (android) or apple maps (ios) were more accurate at slower speeds.

Yea I think the issue is “CTO” at a 5 person company just doesn’t feel like the same level of accomplishment as CTO of a much larger company/team. It’s tough to grind for years and not see the growth you expect and be in the position you expect. I hate to say it but if climbing titles and making the most money is your goal, you should probably not stay somewhere for 3 years. 2 most, then start looking for your next opportunity making more money, running a bigger team, doing something more exciting, etc.

I felt it in the past. My experience was related to the environment of the startup I was at. I started it with 2 others but we were all remote and our ideas didn't bounce off well with a sense of energy and electricity. But the people I am working with now are quite different, they love what they do and we get energy and clarity from our interactions. Grinding without seeing results is difficult, so try to get back on the "effective" grind. If the product is built and you are only maintaining code you won't grow as much as you desire. Start a hackathon project! Get back the excitement by testing/working on the mission with a new angle (perhaps incorporating AI? It's pretty interesting to learn-- not sure if it fits nicely into your startup)

Bottomline without too much advice. We feel that we are growing when we are learning and acting deliberately. When we are challenged and stretched to do new things. An idea is to find a feature/idea that needs to be validated to ship an early version of it in front of your customers to test. It could start a new adventure.

Hot take but if you feel your personal growth has been stuck, it’s because your revenue growth has been stuck. Revenue solves most things.

Strongly agree, but you should still be able to feeling like you are growing (maybe not in a management sense) without revenue growth. It can also be a limitation of your team (either not being stronger than you as an engineer which pushes growth) or just the team size being sufficiently small where you are mostly on your own.

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