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Clarity

Eric Weiss

San Diego, CA

Startup founder, author, executive coach, fractional CTO, product strategy consultant.

I help startup founders build great products and grow their business. Whether you've got an idea or a released product, I can help you move faster, grow bigger, make more money, and help more people. I've helped dozens of companies, from fledgling startups to Fortune 100 companies, gain maturity in their leadership, product strategy, and agile development process.

$4.17/min

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Software Development Startup Consulting Product Management Product Strategy Tech startups and entrepreneurship Scrum Product Development Business Growth

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Scalable Product Development Process, Product Management, and SDLC Process

As CTO and product manager of a fast-growing direct-to-consumer startup, I own the entire product development process, including the strategic vision, roadmap, feature planning, release scoping, sprint planning, execution, product validation, deployment, and analytics.

I will assess your product development process, find bottlenecks or points of failure, and recommend an end-to-end process to help you validate ideas, build great products, and utilize customer feedback to close the loop.

Motivation, Personal Growth, Accountability, and Transformational Leadership

I have been leading agile software development teams for over a decade. I have a deep passion for transformational leadership, and the role of the leader as an agent for personal growth.

I can help you assess the personal profiles and motivations for your team members, develop personal growth plans, and setup systems of accountability to push them along their path. This model creates an environment where individuals are accountable to themselves and each other and micromanagement is minimized. Each individual is bought in to the company mission, and knows their purpose in completing the mission.

Building Your First Software Product Without Wasting All Your Money

I've been developing software products and building startups for 15 years. In my coaching and consulting business, I deal with non-technical founders every day who jumped right into building a software product, and saw everything grind to a halt about 1-2 years later.

I can help you navigate the process of building a software product, from validating the idea to sourcing or building a development team, clearly conveying your product vision, evaluating and prioritizing potential feature ideas, engaging with the developers effectively, iterating quickly and gathering user feedback, and ensuring the product is built on a solid architecture that can scale.

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Eric Weiss answered

My app is getting 10k/day in downloads but I don't have a money for more marketing— how can I find investors?

If you have to pay for users, your app sucks.

What I mean is, your revenue model should be such that:
cost/install * installs/registrations * registrations/purchases < # purchases * revenue/purchase

That's a long-winded way of saying your revenue should be greater than your costs. The problem is, the cost to acquire users has become prohibitively expensive in the last 2 years. The cost to acquire users on Facebook has multiplied by 5-8x. So unless you're selling big ticket items, it doesn't make sense. If you're selling an app subscription or in-app purchases, you've pretty much got to go with organic growth.

So, subscribe wholeheartedly to the growth-hacking model. Ensure that your product has a high viral coefficient, meaning that the app experience gets better for you the more people you refer. Provide incentives to sign people up. Get people to share, and then get them to convert.

Once you've reached a solid growth velocity (double digit MoM), and your conversion rate is high, it'll be easy to get money to pour fuel onto the fire.

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Mobile applications

Eric Weiss answered

Which technique is the most used to prioritize features and what's the best tool to use to do that?

I'm a big fan of Pirate Metrics (AARRR), or:

A - Acquisition
A - Activation
R- Retention
R - Referral
R - Revenue

Some people throw another A on there for Awareness. Essentially you will create a spreadsheet with every product feature as a row, and each metric as a column. You then rank each feature against each metric with a 1-5 score.

In addition, I add a separate set of columns for Risk, Effort/Cost, and Impact. Score them the same way.

If you'd like, you can add a weight to each column, based on how important it is to your business at that time. For example, if you're focusing on growth, acquisition may be more important than revenue, so you'd give Acquisition a 5 and revenue a 2. You can then do a blended average, where you multiply each column score by the weight, and sum all the terms together. This will give you an overall score by which to rank all the features.

Hope this helps!

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Product Management

Product Design

Product Development

Eric Weiss answered

What do you look for when selecting technical/solution architect for a cross-platform mobile app?

Cross-platform frameworks are just now becoming robust and stable enough to be a real concern. The most popular frameworks include React Native, Xamarin, and Ionic. The trade-offs are typically speed of development vs. flexibility and complexity. If you use a lot of platform-specific integrations like HealthKit or Google Fit, your best bet is React Native, as it spits out real native Java or Objective-C that you can further tweak or integrate. Xamarin or Ionic basically put wrappers around C# or HTML5, so your deep integrations are limited.

As far as the architect is involved, you're looking for someone who has experience in both Objective-C and Java, as well as the cross-platform language, whether it be Javascript or C#. This is because once you've built your cross-platform app, you still may have to write native libraries to integrate to the platform-specific features like HealthKit.

I can't speak for the education industry itself. You can post listings on Angelist or StackOverflow, but also scour LinkedIn to attempt to poach people. You have to assume a good architect is already well employed and isn't looking for work, so you're going to have to go out and find them.

I've ran into this problem before, in that good architects are really hard to find. It may be easier to hire a good mid-level developer, and train them in architecture. That basically means carving out 40-50% of their time to spend on architecture and research. They will then grow into that role in 6-12 months.

Hope this helps.

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Mobile applications

Mobile Technology

Technical Architecture

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Member since March 2017