20+ yrs. Business and Military software development experience
Work less, not more.
People have questions about hiring: when to hire, how to hire, how to not get screwed. I can tell you my experience and how I changed.
Learned the hard-way about sales. Sales is easier than most think, difficult in execute. It can be "easy" though.
Process is a dirty word, but you can't scale or grow without it. There are a few easy steps to stat taking now to help grow your business or sell your business.
I tell everyone my ideas, even as we build them. A perfect example is the question on this site itself: https://clarity.fm/questions/2876/i-am-starting-two-new-companies-but-one-requires-80-of-my-time-how-do-i-hold ...
Someone has started, or "built" and idea, and didn't see it through. Worst-case scenario: you tell someone, they build it, they f*ck up the end-game.
The people that come up with the idea have the passion to see-it-thru during hard-times. People that "steal" your idea, will give up when things get difficult 'cause they don't believe it, they just saw "dollar-signs" and thought it would be easy-money. No such thing as easy-money.
It's awesome.
My immediate answer to anything related to inventory and physical-goods is: shopify.com. The API is clean and there are a lot integrations for them. Can answer better if there is a more specific information around what system the inventory is currently in?
My suggestion for you: focus.
If you dont have the resources or money to hire someone, why are you starting a second company? The second one will suffer the same fate as the first. I would suggest focus all efforts on the finished platform since thats the easiest to bring customers onto. If the finished platform is "boring", then just shut it down and focus on the new platform.
Charge-up your sales efforts. If you're bootstrapping, why stop now?
No, you use Shopify.com and then build integrations for it. You can then sell those integrations and create more revenue streams.
*Hosting* When building software for our customers, we always use Heroku (http://heroku.com). We refuse to use EC2 etc in the beginning, since the name-of-the-game is to focus all time and money on the actual software. I really hate the hosting question since this doesn't matter in the beginning. For most start-ups today: heroku-free option is just fine.
*Deployment* This is taken care of when using Heroku, 'cause all you need to do push your code to the repo and it's deployed. Time-saved.
*Chat* Today, use Slack (http://slackhq.com). It has a ton of integrations.
*Error Monitoring* Airbrake or something hosted.
Smartest CTO's use whatever get the job done that uses the least-friction for the team.
Your milage may vary, but from our experience, in short (please verify with a Tax-accountant, I have one I can refer you to): if you're paying people to do work for you that do not have a U.S. Tax ID #, it's a complete write-off and you do not require a W9 from them.
I would hurl myself toward getting the following working first: * User signup (default to user) * Profile setup (photo, etc). * Add Stripe information * Make it easy to share the link to my profile * Enable Expert-mode, to answer phone calls * Enable Twilio for calls * Set Hourly-rate for calls * Build/program API to handle conference calls etc * Connect to LinkedIn / Facebook / Twitter for 'verification'
I wouldn't spend time with any Javascript frameworks etc at first. Just make it usable and not a pain for people to get in and make a phone call, or edit their profile.
Other than that, Clarity is very well built as it is. I'm sure you're trying to build this for a specific business.
You need an itemized list of the changes that need to happen. Time & Cost (moreso time it sounds like) to knock them out. To answer your question, look for a consulting company that specializes in the language/technology your platform is in.
We have built a product on Twilio that we sell to doctors offices. To my knowledge, what you're asking for is not possible as-is.
What you could do though: When someone calls, have the system text message you "Hey, this number called, click here to call them back" ... and the "click here" is a URL that hits your server and initiates the call from your server, creates a call conference, and then drops you and the person you're calling back into the call conference.
