However, the allergic reaction many founders and technical teams have to outsource engineering efforts is pervasive. Most teams have had experiences that make even considering outsourcing a moot point. If not within their current team, someone in the company has had a terrible experience. So how do you get over the past scorched earth of other firms and agencies? How can you provide comfort and ease the concerns of a team that needs to be shipping faster but can't hire full-time engineers?

We have been solving this problem for the past few years in a few different ways;

Working with engineers that ship.

We pride ourselves in having a high technical and aptitude bar for engineers who we work with. Thankfully, many of them are our friends who we have worked with in the past. Our pool of venture investments, VC firms, and startups that we are associated with and in our network have provided an amazing group to work with. Engineers that have been a part of a fast-growing team, that ships amazing products, used by millions or at venture scale means great people. Screening for communications, aptitude, self-management capabilities and those that can plug in from day one gives us an incredible bench of engineers.

Focus.

A growing number of GottaGoFast.com engineers are building their own startup. Sometimes its hard to find the mental space or time to work on something on your own. by working with only one client provides focus for them, and the headspace for the engineer to build. Working across their own idea and yours has proven valuable - problem solving is often about stepping away and coming back at a later point. We see that time and again the aversion to outsourcing is caused from the lack of attention someone has, the context switching concerns, and the lack of communication with engineers. GottaGoFast.com plugs people directly into teams. For the most part, they are similar to a full time employee on your team, without the benefits, stock, and maintenance required. They join your slack channel. They join your standups. They join whatever systems and platforms you use and are there when you need them.

Experience.

Unlike other firms and agencies that may have fewer senior engineers working on multiple clients and charging by the hour, our engineers have a wealth of experience shipping code at venture-scale companies. They are experienced leaders who can provide valuable guidance and mentorship to your team. One of the key benefits of working with GottaGoFast.com is that our engineers are self-motivated and self-managing. They do not require any account management and are able to hit the ground running with minimal onboarding. When teams work with experience engineers, the entire team benefits.

Proof.

We have been doing incredible work for scaling companies for the past few years. By being an independent platform, we are there when companies need us and have a track record of success. Some of our recent wins include;

• Just Salad - bringing their entire tech stack (app + web) in house

• Mockingbird - helping scale eCommerce platform and logistics

• Red Antler - Providing technical expertise to one of the best design firms in the world

Our Engineers our amazing

Gaining comfort with GGF

The initial reaction to firms and companies that promise the world and deliver subpar results is understandable. By modeling our offering on a monthly retainer, never counting hours or lines of code, we focus on shipping the right products for great teams, when they are ready. The proof is with our customers who love us. The results are seen with our partners who are growing their GGF engineering teams. The conclusion is that not all non-full-time teams are made the same and we would love to set up a time to chat with you about how GottaGoFast.com can plug into your company and help you where you need it most.

A lot has changed since the middle of 2020, but much has remained the same. He outlines the areas to work on, what will happen with improvements, and a foundation to build upon. I wanted to take things a step further. If the time to build is now, and we all agree, how can we ship something over the line that makes a difference?

Let’s Get Building

Even though the world and markets are going through many changes now that the pandemic is over, momentum still needs to be improved. To build a stronger United States, people must overcome their inertia, drive, and will. A mission this exorbitant in size and scope is difficult to fulfill but critical to our country's and society's success.

Andreessen is open to suggestions about what needs to be built to solve the aftershocks of a post-pandemic world. However, the US building industry needs consistent funding, a laser-like focus, and organized efforts to get back on its feet. He recognizes that it is necessary to have patience when negotiating with institutions that are disadvantageous to builders, making the process of construction aggravating as hell.

I have a different mantra and a different question: I accept this call to action and would like to know if shipping is just as critical as building.

Why Shipping Is Important When Building

Shipping defines software engineering in a magical way that is challenging to understand. It's the grace and elegance of building something, bringing it into the world, and seeing millions of people use it to benefit their quality of life. The appeal is that scaling a product to millions of users simply requires a focused team. This collective of quality team members fosters an environment conducive to creative resolutions.

Examples of this are the 30+ people that Craigslist employs, a platform accessed by millions, if not billions, of internet users every day. It’s evident in the rise of companies like WhatsApp and Instagram that employed a mere 20+ people before their acquisition. Each is a demonstration of the critical role that shipping plays in building. When executed correctly, it's admirable. After all, the American dream is composed of the desire for financial stability while having a positive impact on the world and ultimately inspiring future generations.

In the fintech ecosystem, the development of a product could mean the transfer of billions of dollars per month, and consumer product creation and delivery can have an impact on a vast network. When you release a software service that solves a problem that many people have, your monthly revenue can grow exponentially.

So what exactly does shipping mean?

• Shipping means a product worth using.

• Shipping means producing something to be proud of.

• Shipping begets more shipping.

• Shipping means completion.

• Shipping is about a team coming together in concert to achieve a common goal.

• Shipping is movement.

The art of shipping something means that you have worked as a unit to put something out into the world that you can take pride in; a return on investment that helps others.

There has never been a better time to start working better together. By working with people who care about the craft of engineering and building their own products to simplify the lives of others, we can ship smarter.

The idea of shipping faster is about working in unison towards a common goal. Beyond the needs of a Kanban board or a list of tickets to be completed, there is a person with a problem that needs to be solved. Building for this person is critical to any software company's success. Surrounding your team with people who have done it before, shipped incredible products to millions of people, and can level up the team around them is pivotal to a common goal.

Shipping Faster is About Caring About Your Product, Your Team, and Your Customer.

GottaGoFast.com is home to an amazing group of engineers who all want to make their own products and contribute to intellectually interesting things. We fulfill their goal of completing meaningful consulting work that pays the bills while allowing the time and energy required to bring an idea to fruition. We believe that we need more builders, more founders, and more shippers. Startup experience at the highest levels of engineering is very hard to come by, making recruiting difficult when looking for people who can increase the shipping speed and efficiency of a team. Gotta Go Fast increases shipping speed and quality in tandem by bringing on engineers who want to build on a fractional basis while also working individually on their own projects.

Shipping faster doesn’t mean burnout.

One of the most common questions we get around engineering time is why they are not full-time or “working” in a full-time capacity. To answer this question, it's best to first realize that no engineer is actually coding 40 hours a week, even as a full-time employee.

To understand the time and energy spent, simply talk to any founder-level or staff engineer – they will share how they get into the flow state of coding, how they approach their days, and what great output looks like. This shows their worth, productivity, and shipping expertise are not measured by hours or lines of code.

By working on their projects and companies, engineers have the creative and mental energy to dive into a team's startup with ease. Long gone are the days of worrying whether your top engineer is feeling burnt out. Instead, we know that they are driven to be creative by their business ventures. By hiring an engineer through Gotta Go Fast, you help them afford to pursue their dreams by having them spend the majority of their time working on your startup's difficulties and encouraging their passion on the side.

Solving Client Shipping Challenges And Combatting Their Own.

At their core, startups need people who ship, so we exclusively work with shippers that have a proven track record. That’s how difficult and easy it is. Finding people who have done it before at venture-scale startups ensures that clients are working with amazing developers.

Great engineers want to work with great engineers, and that is exactly what they get with Gotta Go Fast. A group of like-minded founder-level builders, all working on venture-scale startups that want to ship faster. They can build and ship, combining their passion projects with paying their bills. They can bootstrap what they want to see in the world in a way that makes more sense for them.

In a perfect world, you have the team you need when you need it for the price you prefer. In the meantime, GottaGoFast.com can assist you in locating the candidate your company needs to fill in the gaps. We have provided fundamental engineering support for scaling startups, instrumented team hiring procedures for venture companies, and built alongside the top startups in the country. Reach out if you're interested in having these or other engineering issues fixed.

Throughout most of 2020-2022, the startup world was met with easy access to capital, too many ideas that got funding, and a glut of hiring. Now with layoffs growing by the day, a reckoning has come for overfunded companies without much to show for their burn. In this articulation of what we are building and why I wanted to go deep into what I call the slow-burn startup and how it plays a role in our ecosystem.

To begin with, the idea of a slow-burn startup is not new. The idea of "ramen profitable" comes from being able to cover the costs of a startup and be "profitable" but perhaps not pay all the bills. As long as a service provides value, people are paying for it, and care if it goes away - there is a reason to keep it alive and running. Bonus points if that service is accretive to something else you are working on.

Enough conjecture, let's get specific. Our first slow-burn startup is www.viewsource.to - a beautiful portfolio maker for developers (or simply put: dribble for developers).

Viewsource is an answer to the question "how do I create a beautiful portfolio site if I am a skilled developer without much setup and maintenance?"

Solving a real problem

When we set out to look at the space of developer portfolios we found a graveyard of startups that tried to make this work. Failed launches, products that don't work, and a completely underserved market. We wanted to talk to real potential customers, and since that is who we deal with on an everyday basis (after all that is our main business: GottaGoFast.com) we discovered what was missing. We heard stories of incredible developers who don't even have their own sites. We saw examples of developer portfolios that haven't been touched in over a decade. We kept hearing over and over that there was no one-stop solution for a developer to SHOW vs. TELL what they do and how. LinkedIn is great for where you have worked. A personal blog is a nice way to publish and share what you are writing (albeit hard to maintain and you need to keep publishing). Personal website makers are great for artists and designers (and many other things!) but not great for developers.

We built ViewSource to meet the needs of showing off what you have done professionally, what are you working on for fun, and where your proficiencies are aligned with what you want to do.

Creating a sustainable business

Our hypothesis is that if you create something people want, they will pay for it. At the start, ViewSource has two options for use and is a freemium product. The first gives you access to an incredible set of themes to control the look and feel of your site. It also allows you to add work history and projects as you see fit. You can even set up a way for people to get in contact for work. The paid tier allows more customization, access to premium themes, and more. The pricing model is simple; Free and Paid. At launch, this is $0 and $10 per month.

Optimized architecture serving static sites to end users, minimizing back-end services to publishing and updates, and building a portfolio engine that works all costs time and money. By focussing on profitability from the start, we were able to make design and strategy decisions that aligned with what it would take to run this business for the long term.

The slow burn startup means that for every X dollars we spent, we want to be making X+1 dollars in return. This instant profitability gives us a growth engine to experiment. It gives users solace that we will be around for the long term. It also provides a real value exchange in return for a platform that isn't found anywhere else.

Flywheel to all we do

Our core business that provides the resources to explore and build is GottaGoFast.com a place for companies that need senior product engineering help at a fraction of a full-time employee, for better output. This means that regularly we are always looking for great engineers. Great engineers need a better place to build their portfolios. ViewSource provides them with this solution while providing us with an incredible pipeline for talent. We can share ViewSource profiles with prospective clients, engineers can show off and find work elsewhere that doesn't align with our focus, and we can generally be an incredible schelling point for engineers.

Slow burn, long impact.

By not raising outside capital we are in control of our own destiny. We are looking at the next 24 months as a way to start this snowball of revenue rolling and continue it into the future. By providing the audience we respect (engineers!) a place to show off their abilities we hope to bring new full-time and consulting opportunities to them. By creating a revenue-generating profitable business, we hope to create the foundation for a long-term business that isn't impacted by market trends or urgency to grow at all costs. Our purpose is serving engineers by not overspending, and being around for the long haul.

If you are interested in what we are building and want to join this movement feel free to reach out - happy shipping!

We are inviting developers to help us alpha test portfolios as we get ready to launch more publicly.

If you are curious to know what a finished portfolio looks like take a look at: https://viewsource.to/john

As developers, we know firsthand how frustrating it can be to try and create a portfolio that accurately represents work history, projects, and skills. Traditional portfolio site builders are often built for designers, with limited customization options and a lot of time-consuming manual work. The best developers we know also don't update or maintain their portfolios as it's too time-consuming and frustrating.

That is why we built ViewSource - the portfolio site builder we wish existed for ourselves.

• Choose from elegant themes

• Import your projects with just a URL and a few fast edits

• Show off your skills

Having a portfolio is a great way to show vs. tell what you can do as a developer. Inviting potential clients, employers, and customers to get in contact is easy with a customizable link to send you an email, set up a time via a calendar link, or link directly where you want.

But don't just take our word for it – check out some of the amazing developer portfolios that have already been built on ViewSource.

Seeing our friends and developers create portfolios quickly has been a great way to validate what we have built and we are opening up this platform to others today.

So if you're tired of struggling to create a developer portfolio that accurately represents your skills and experience, give ViewSource a try. We think you'll love it as much as we do.

What would it be like to have these problems solved within your organization? By hiring a fractional engineer, your team will experience a significant reduction in the time it takes to identify a solution to that resource being operational and ready to ship. Your team will also level up by working with an engineer with over a decade of experience leading engineering.

Below are the most common issues facing our fractional engineers and how we help to connect you to top professionals with extensive industry knowledge.

Not Shipping Features Fast Enough and Not Planning Ahead

Having an experienced engineer to spec out work could save months of development time. By having them plan out the next few sprints, they can help prioritize what needs to be done and make sure everything is in scope.

Planning out the upfront work will reduce the risk of building things that don’t fit, and by having an engineer who has solved the same problem several times already plan it out, you will have a higher chance of success. The team will be better able to build the correct thing in the right way, all within a timely manner, once everyone on the team has a clear understanding of the problem. Gotta Go Fast engineers have implemented dozens of RFC processes (Request for Comments). This memorandum helps align the entire team on how the new features will work with the existing system.

Not only can a Gotta Go Fast engineer implement this process. They can also quickly grok the entire system to build these documents. Having this process can will save months of engineering time and reduce the risk of throwaway code. Throwaway work can happen to anyone and can happen quite easily at a fast-paced company.

By hiring through Gotta Go Fast, you can ship faster and educate your team by bringing on an engineer who best understands what to build next as a high-level strategy to align the team and start shipping faster.

Inefficient or Missing Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

An expert engineer can provide your company a quick win by instrumenting even just the basic benefits of Continuous Integration. To build a dynamic process of integrating and providing the product to the market, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery rank among the most important processes.

To some engineers, adding CI may seem like too much work; this may have been the case back when we were all responsible for hosting and maintaining our own Jenkins Instance. However, Basic CI configuration now takes less than 5 minutes using the currently available tools.

This extra step isn’t considered audacious or over-the-top by any means to the engineers at Gotta Go Fast. It’s necessary to ensure that your code's build is developed correctly. At GGF, CI is necessary for our engineer's quality assurance procedures. Continuous Integration relies heavily on automated testing of its software. When new changes are merged into the master branch, you can use this to determine if anything has broken.

With Continuous Deployment, the goal is to automate the process of deploying resources into your systems. Typically, this entails an automatic deployment into development, followed by a manual decision to send that resource to later stages, and eventually a deployment to production. Continuous Deployment takes this a step further by eliminating these tedious decisions. This automatic process is a terrific method to shorten the time it takes to hear back from clients and speed up the feedback loop so that the engineer can launch faster.

To establish cohesion between CI and CD, creating a productive git workflow is crucial. This is especially true when working with a large, geographically dispersed team. With several developers and dozens of changes being made daily, things can quickly spiral out of hand.

Scaling and Performance Issues

The saying "do things that don't scale" is effective advice... until it isn't. When that happens, it's time to start investing in a real foundation. We get it, you’ve built a solid foundation for your bottom line and have developed a great Minimum Viable Product (MVP). But it’s time to take the next step and to re-engineer your system to provide a bigger product to handle your customers at scale. When you take the leap to hire a fractional engineer with Gotta Go Fast, you will spend less on maintenance, improve the user experience, and boost your company’s flexibility by enabling your team to respond to trends faster than your competitors.

When you have your first "large" customer and realize you need to redesign your systems to accommodate them, working with an engineer who has done it before is a tremendous asset. However, the successful solutions for the smaller teams that made up your early customers will not produce the same results for your large enterprise customers.

Filling this role with the right fit the first time is well worth the investment. To give you the best working experience possible, Gotta Go Fast only works with accomplished engineers who have significant track records with start-ups and a passion for building companies fast.

Additionally, The client services and sales teams, who depend on performance to tell your story, can benefit from fine-tuning your API endpoints that have been timing out or taking too long to respond.

Frequent outages and bugs

The era of "move fast and break things" is over. You have paying customers, a 7 figure marketing budget, and outages and bugs are causing quantifiable damage to your business.

Our engineers have worked with companies with over a $100 million marketing budget and even larger revenue. Your QA processes and test coverage should be aligned to protect these.

This includes building processes from scratch. Adding automated testing to our CI/CD pipeline and utilizing tools to make sure any outage is quickly recognized and resolved.

Even if you’re not spending millions a month on marketing. There are some simple QA processes our engineers can help you implement so you can build trust with your users.

We aren't planning on achieving full code coverage in the short term. Several testing and monitoring services are available, some of which are more appropriate than others depending on the development stage of your business.

However, it is vital to the success of your product that the software engineer you hire through GGF has a proven strategy for implementing a quality assurance process to test and analyze bugs in your product. An experienced engineer should be able to complete their QA process between 2-6 weeks, where they will analyze potential risks and develop a risk mitigation plan.

To prevent frequent outages and bugs from creeping through your code, it’s imperative to add integration tests to critical flows, add automated tests to the CI/CD pipeline to speed up the testing process, and configure tooling to catch errors by using an end-user monitoring system such as Pingdom.

Missing analytics and tracking KPIs

"You can't improve what you don't measure"

Adding analytics is usually an afterthought when building a new feature. Even if you're just building an MVP, when you need to add analytics you'll always wish you added them earlier. Implementing analytics can be done very quickly and the services at the early stage are free and scale with you.

You need to know where your customers are coming from, where in the funnel they are getting stuck, and how new features are improving your KPIs. There are dozens of different analytic tools out there, and our engineers can help you choose the ones that are right for you.

Outside of product analytics, there are also business intelligence tools for bigger organizations that need to gather data from multiple sources to get a source of truth for different business metrics such as financials and marketing attribution. We've set up data stacks to provide businesses with dashboards to see how different marketing campaigns are impacting their business and how operations are performing.

In order to properly measure your product, you need a team member with the correct credentials and experience that understands how to measure your product and business. At Gotta Go Fast, we can provide you with a CTO with viable experience that can measure where your code needs to be in order to deliver a robust, well-rounded product for your customer.

In a perfect world, you have the team you need when you need it for the price you prefer. In the meantime, GottaGoFast.com can assist you in locating the candidate your company needs to fill in the gaps. We have provided fundamental engineering support for scaling startups, instrumented team hiring procedures for venture companies, and built alongside the top startups in the country. Reach out if you're interested in having these or other engineering issues fixed.

5 years after starting, we sold it to Greenhouse, resulting in a great outcome for everyone involved: founders, employees, investors, and even the acquirer. A rare result for startups.

I wouldn’t recommend burning through all your savings and going into debt to build a startup to anyone.

Knowing what I know now, there’s a much better way to bootstrap your startup, especially as a technical co-founder.

The path I wish I had available to me is the company I am building today; GottaGoFast.com, founding engineers working for startups that want to ship great products. We work with engineers that have created and shipped great products, and who have built or are building their own companies. We plug them in on a fractional basis to companies that need their help.

As a CTO and builder, working with a team and collaborating with others is critical, and would have given me the personal runway to do more. Below is the story that led me to discover this new path of earning while building.

My story of starting and pivoting

I’ve always loved building and shipping products. After 5 years of working in seed stage companies, I finally took the leap to start my own company with my co-founder Steven Lu.

We charged in trying to solve a simple problem that we’ve seen as engineers. In 2 months, we built and launched a simple tool for monitoring endpoints called Perf. We spent about a month trying to find customers and quickly realized that there really wasn’t a product market fit. In our attempts to find customers while being on a tight budget we built a sales tool to find email addresses and send email campaigns.

The tool we built to help ourselves find customers for our product was so helpful to us and others, we soon found that spending more time on it made sense. This new tool became Interseller, and friends and our network started using it to grow too. Two months after launching Perf we pivoted and launched Interseller on Product Hunt.

Lesson 1: Don’t build just to build. Solve a big problem and don’t be afraid to pivot to solve a problem your own company is facing. Some of the world’s biggest companies started out as something completely different. Slack used to be a gaming company. Segment used to be a classroom lecture tool.

For the next 6 months, we worked tirelessly to take our quick MVP to a fully fleshed product.

During that time we weren’t earning enough to pay ourselves anything, but MRR was growing steadily. In order to pay rent and keep food on the table, we did freelance work. We also used this money to hire our amazing designer Oli Lisher to create our brand and website. Oli also created the branding for Gotta Go Fast!

Lesson 2: Have a cartoon animal mascot. 🚀🐢🐻 It may not give you product market fit, but people will remember it :)

It was great to do some freelance work to earn money without committing to a full-time job. The issue that we encountered though was when we did freelance work, the work on Interseller came to a full stop.

We also encountered all the traditional issues with freelancing: scope creep on projects, not defining milestones well enough, and chasing down invoices. The projects we wound up working on always exploded in scope usually becoming twice as much work as expected.

When doing hourly freelancing work. I’ve always found myself being nickel-and-dimed on the hours or rate, and when working hourly the jobs were always small requiring more time finding clients and setting up contracts.

During my time building Interseller and trying to get freelance work involved either a small 10 - 15 hour job or a project that turns into a full month of work that didn’t allow me to work on my company. Not until starting Gotta Go Fast did I realize monthly fractional work was exactly what I needed. The value of having someone else deal with the freelancer slog is priceless

You can still build your company without years of personal runway saved up or going into unreasonable debt. If you’re a proven engineer that is making the leap to start their own business, there are hundreds of companies that would love to have you on their team on a fractional basis sharing your knowledge. You can help them build their dream company while working on your own.

Lesson 3: Do steady fractional freelance work to focus on building. Don’t waste time on contracts, negotiations, or sourcing.

10 months after bootstrapping and raising our round, I was able to pay myself about half of what I would make at a well-funded startup. The benefit was that I no longer had to worry about paying rent or picking up freelance work. The downside was that I wish I was making a higher salary.

The most valuable thing gained from Expa was the advice of the partners. Specifically from Eric Friedman, my now friend and partner of Gotta Go Fast, who said over and over to raise our price. When we joined we were charging $15 a month, he told us to charge $200, we found that number absurd. Interseller now charges $200 / month. It took us a year to slowly get there.

I’ve always struggled to know my value, and how to value what I built. It’s something I believe most engineers aren’t great at.

Lesson 4: You’re worth way more than you think. There are very few people in this world that have built a product and sold it to customers. Most people dream of being able to do it one day. You can help them realize their dream by sharing all the lessons you’ve experienced as a founder.

At the start of Interseller, I would work up to 100 hours a week. Looking back on it now and doing the math, with my founder's salary and the number of hours I worked I was making minimum wage. Almost all founders at the early stage that raise venture capital or from friends and family are making minimum wage or less. Prior to raising with Expa, my hourly rate would have been less than $1

Lesson 5: Burnout is real. Having a work-life balance is important. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and your mental health is important. I went through many ups and downs. You need to make time for friends and family and not make your entire life your company.

Interseller didn’t take much money to run, it was more about just putting in product/engineering time, customer support, and sales calls. If I had to do it all over again, I would have done fractional work for a company while building Interseller. That would give us the budget to hire a customer success manager and sales person much earlier. Much like how he hired our amazing designer with money that we made while freelancing.

This is what we’re doing now at Gotta Go Fast. We have a dozen founding engineers working with companies while building their own businesses.

Lesson 6: Don’t let your personal runway limit you from building your company. Give yourself time to keep building, find product market fit, and then jump in 100% when you’re ready. GottaGoFast provides personal runway coupled with excellence in engineering to give you confidence.

If you’re an engineer building your own company and want to learn more about Gotta Go Fast, apply here.

If you’re a company that would love to have the entrepreneurial focus of a founding CTO level up your product and team contact us here.

Anything else, send us a note at hello@gottagofast.com

Having worked with some of the best engineers who have shipped amazing products, to millions of consumers or thousands of businesses, we know a thing or two about driving impact. That is why we created Gotta Go Fast.

GGF matches high quality fractional engineers, based on a track record of success (and a lot of times previous working relationships!) with great startups. Working with engineers that have shipped amazing products, worked inside venture scale startups, and know how to build a team makes a huge difference.

Clients and potential clients continue to ask us the important questions - like the ones below - and we wanted to outline why this model makes sense, the quality bar is high, and the economics work for startups.

Does it scale?

A great question we often get is “how does this scale to 1,000 engineers?” and the answer is simple: “it doesn’t”.

This may shock some people, but we specialize in building an incredible bench of fractional engineers, not having thousands of people to place. This means working with people we have relationships with, have personally vetted, and bring into our own community of engineers.

Who are these engineers?

There are simply not enough qualified engineers that have shipped amazing code, at venture scale companies, that want to go back and be employees. The best of the best are starting their own companies, becoming a VP of engineering or CTO, or simply do not have to work anymore.

GottaGoFast engineers are mainly made up of the following; Founder engineers bootstrapping their own startup Engineers that want to work on exciting projects fractionally Engineers that love startups, but want to earn more Taking a break from the startup grind and doing fractional engineering work

Is it worth it?

To answer the question about “worth” and “value” let's look at the two options in front of an early stage founder. Let's say there is a Seed/Srs A company with 10 employees looking to bring on engineer #8 into their team.

Gotta Go Fast engineers have the biggest impact when placed with an existing team of engineers that can be leveled up by working alongside an engineer with a decade of experience in startups. Ideally there is an existing roadmap with designs and a need to add someone new to help them move quicker. Whether this means shipping your next version faster, optimizing a codebase, or general and admin excellence such as catchup up on technical debt or a backlog - GGF engineers can plug in and move quickly.Whether this means shipping your

Option 1: Recruiting/Hiring

(using the median data below from Levels.fyi)

Salary: $200,000 Recruiting agency: 25% of first year salary: $50,000 Benefits/taxes 28% of Salary: $56,000 Equity 0.1%-0.5%: $100,000 Timing: At LEAST 3 months to recruit, interview, transition, ramp

Total: $200K + $50K + $56K + $100K = $406,000 ($33,833 per month with equity value)

Option 2: Gotta Go Fast Fractional Engineer

Salary: $0.00 Recruiting: $0.00 Benefits: $0.00 (1099 contractor) Equity: 0% Timing: Most engineers start in 2-3 weeks (faster with no MSA redlines!)

Total: $20K-$25K per month

That is a monthly burn savings of $8K+ and you can get started this quarter.

How much does it cost to hire a full time engineer?

You don’t have to take our word for it. According to Levels.fyi a software engineer makes about $200K a year. This doesn’t include taxes and benefits paid for by a startup, or equity.

What are the main benefits?

Working with an engineer that has worked at a scaling startup has advantages.

The first is that they are able to contribute solid code, efficient in many ways, based on a track record of contributions and experience in their respective discipline.

The second is that many teams benefit from the tempo or cadence a senior product engineer can bring. Simply gaining the operational efficiency from someone who has been around a high performing startup benefits everyone.

Third is the team fit and cultural benefit. By having a fractional engineer you do not risk valuable equity that can go to the rest of the option pool and employees.

Fourth is having a “founder mindset” on the team. In many cases, GGF engineers are working on their own thing. They are self starters, motivated,, and understand resource management, and can help prioritize engineering work to improve revenue or get to product market fit faster. Instead of other firms that split engineer time across too many projects, our team concentrates on what is in front of them.

Who is behind Gotta Go Fast?

Chances are, we are a lot like you founder friend. We are Jonathan Grana and Eric Friedman - co-founders of GGF and friends since 2016. John has been a CTO 3X and co-founded multiple venture scale startups. He has raised money from some of the best firms, and built world class engineering teams. Eric has been a long time startup investor and operator, including working with John before. They are interested in helping engineers who aren’t interested in dealing with negotiations and sales, and want to focus on code, plug into great startups.

We are builders at heart and excited to be helping talented engineers (and many friends!) find fractional engineering jobs they love. We love helping high growth startups that want to level up their engineering orgs, get through their backlog, and start shipping faster.

If you are interested in joining as an engineer or a client - reach out

Last year they redesigned their mobile app and added multiple new features, investing the time and energy with an agency. Once they had designs they loved it was time to turn pixels into applications. They had a legacy API platform, new product lines, and a cross platform design to bring to life.

When they shopped around they found many agencies willing to scope out the work - charging a small fortune - to have a list of project items to complete. All needed to have an ironed out scope of work and an unknown set of developers.

When they came across Gotta Go Fast they found that scope based work made little sense. They needed a senior product engineer who could come in as a fractional CTO - truly orchestrating all the work. Combining engineering talent, outsourced platform development, a design agency and multiple integration systems. This meant someone that could work across companies, platforms, and stakeholders to deliver a product and ship code. Having an experienced Fractional CTO who could provide air traffic control to all the moving pieces was critical.

With GGF in place, they completed an app launch, revamped API, with full integration across critical systems, and automated end to end testing in 6 months.

These critical systems included; Otter, Segment, Mixpanel, GrubHub, Fluid Pay, and migration from LevelUp.

Hiring and recruiting is tough for startups. It’s even harder for companies that have specific needs that ebb and flow over time. Talented engineers love complex problems and continuous development. Gotta Go Fast allowed talented engineers who would otherwise have not gone full time on this kind of a platform to work during this spike of engineering need, and ship something great.

JustSalad is a great client because they can benefit from excellent talent, and have them spin up (then down) as needed.

We welcome others who have similar situations and would like to setup a time to go faster with a fractional engineer.

But let’s talk about what you need to do to get there and start coding.

Before your fingers hit your laptop beachside in Fiji you have to endure the freelancer slog…

The slog of finding a client

Prospecting clients takes time and energy. Using a simple funnel of converting 1 client and a 1% success rate - you need to speak to 100 startup founders about what you do. If you were a founder you remember that everybody wants your time and wants to sell to you. If you have been in an IC role you may remember those cold LinkedIn messages and bad outreach emails.

Let’s say you are ready, or already have a great network of startups and VCs ready to send you business…

The slog of setting up contracts and legal paperwork

Companies don’t operate on a handshake. They need a legal agreement that governs the work you will do, the terms of payment, confidentiality and a lot more. You need to have an independent contractor agreement with the entity you are freelancing for. In cases where you do not, the company will set up one for you, which is entirely in their interests not yours. In either case you have to have a lawyer draft your docs, or have them review something that you are going to sign. Without an agreement, no founder is going to move forward.

The Slog of negotiation

Found your first client? Have legal agreements ready? Now it’s time to negotiate the price. It turns out nobody likes to negotiate. You have to know your worth, negotiate a rate you can survive on, and not be nickel and dimed for your time. Hourly work is about as much fun as someone asking to pay for lines of code.

The slog of going back and forth

Most agency or platform work happens with a go between. Whether it’s a project manager, a product manager, or some other PM/manager - it’s a game of telephone. Sometimes they want you to clock in and out, or track hours. It’s not very fun to bill hours (after all you are not a lawyer!).

You know how communication on teams works. Being direct and hearing from the source is always best. Hearing directions from an intermediary isn’t fun or easy. You waste precious time going back and forth, only to have work re-done and have more meetings.

The slog of scope creep

“Sorry that’s outside of scope” - the dreaded words no freelancer wants to say and no client wants to hear. Hourly work means being under a microscope. Project basis work can sprawl quickly. The incentives to “win business” by being cheapest are simply not aligned with quality work.

The slog of Meetings (vs. coding)

Do we need to say more? If you want meetings, and status updates we have some marketplaces for you. If you want to get back to coding and shipping read on. Paul Graham outlined the famous “Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule” and many agree that getting to a flow state and staying there is great. If you want to constantly be context switching from sales, legal, negotiation, 1:1s, and of course coding - you should work on another platform.

The answer is GottaGoFast.com

The best way for freelance engineers to get back to coding. GGF is about putting great engineers into monthly fractional engagements they love. We handle the sales, the negotiations, the legal paperwork, and empower you to plug in directly. We even share our margins and splits with clients directly. If you are interested in learning more about becoming a freelance engineer or seeing our existing GGF engineers visit us.

We are happy to set up a time to talk you through the model, why it works, and why customers are so happy.

Skip the slog, go faster 🐢

We offer incredible engineers on a fractional monthly basis to existing teams that want to ship faster. Our developers are part CTO and part senior product engineers - shipping great code and writing the playbooks to do it again.

We have spent the past year testing our hypothesis with some great companies and incredible engineers. With a motivated group of new engineers coming into the Gotta Go Fast network, we are excited to introduce ourselves to the world and help the slow and steady founder who wants to go a little faster.

Engineering teams have endless needs; technical debt slowing things down, a backlog that is stacking up, all while trying to recruit great people. We provide trusted engineers who know how to ship great products, at a fraction of full time cost of hiring and recruiting. This allows great engineers to freelance on their own terms, and companies a chance to leverage the most qualified talent that’s only available as fractional talent.

Building and shipping great software takes experience, expertise, and a good understanding of what it takes to work together. It takes good communication, great product editing, humility and embracing change. As the founders of GGF we thankfully have seen some things. We have been investing and building startups for a long time.

The “we” behind Gotta Go Fast is myself, Eric Friedman, and Jonathan Grana. John has been a CTO and founder multiple times, and built products and services from the ground up that has scaled to millions of users in the B2B and B2C space. I am a long time operator and investor in startups, including investing in John when he was CEO of Interseller which brought us together in 2017. Working together has sharpened out superpowers - operations and engineering.

Leveraging our network of trusted engineers, we serve other founders who have a list ready to be worked on, but are engineering constrained.

We put great fractional engineers into organizations that have tickets ready to be completed and roadmaps ready to be shipped.

The secret to GGF is combining trust and respect with experience and understanding. Most software projects get spec’d out, designed, and planned with the best of intentions. We have engineers that have done it before, that are ready to ship things over the line and share the playbooks on how to do it again.

Our engineers jump into slack, standups, and planning meetings right away. They get up to speed fast and start contributing on day one. By having GGF fractional engineers be the point of contact for clients we cut down on unnecessary meetings and get back to shipping.

There is no substitution for hard work, dedication to a craft, and making a meaningful impact. We pride ourselves on finding great senior product engineers who want to get back to coding and join great teams on a fractional basis.

Nothing is “outside of scope” (or, How It Works)

Most agencies are geared around a scope of deliverables. Anything outside that list and you hear the dreaded words “outside of scope” causing higher fees and more delays.

Gotta Go Fast is focused around shipping what you need. Contracts are monthly - which means scope changes are a PART of the process not a blocker.

Startups change course often, that is a part of what makes them great. Our engineers know and understand this which is why they are self managed - ready to join your standups, plug into your slack channels, and start taking on tasks.

Gotta Go Fast engineers are incentivized to provide value right away since they are working month to month. If they are not providing value, clients will stop the contracts. Unlike agencies which are incentivized to hit milestones by a certain date forcing them to cut corners.

Monthly contracts align with a culture of listening to teams, getting things done, and being able to embrace chance. Engineers have seen these movies before at their own startups and as part of a team.

GGF contracts are a flat monthly retainer basis - no hourly rates, time limits, or even middle-people to deal with. You get an engineer, on a fractional basis, with domain expertise.

Why are we doing this?

Thanks for asking! We are building a boutique engineering studio to get closer to building and shipping products for companies and startups so we can do a better job of it ourselves. We are building our own ideas, and excited to have proximity to so many others shipping new products. We have some exciting things to share soon, but in the meantime - know that we are builders at heart and this is a great way to create an ecosystem around having great engineers, great companies that want to go faster, and creating things that people want.

If you are interested in working as fractional engineer get in touch

If you are a company or startup that needs help reach out and start going faster.

Now, let's start going faster together.

John & Eric