Seeking owners/tech leaders at US-based software development agencies

I'm not sure if this is how you imagine this world to work, but at least according to the order you wrote it "raising funds" was first. In reality it should actually be one of your final steps of the stage you are at right now. It may even come after a year or two! So you have this great app idea, and you're looking for a place to start... Don't! Don't start yet before you decide whether you have what it takes to get into a roller coaster that can ruin your life and make you miserable! Not trying to scare you but I think most people only hear about these great success stories. They have this dream of maybe, possibly, becoming the next big thing... Because they have the best idea for an app... You don't hear about the failures so often. And even if you do, you don't hear about what the founders of these failing startups had to go through. Truth is you are most likely gonna fail. And I'm saying that without even knowing what your idea is. There are so many barriers on your way that even a great product with a great team is likely to fail. Some people would say "I'm not afraid of failing", "It's good to fail cause you learn", "Failing will make me stronger for the next startup". That's somewhat true but it doesn't mean that failing is easy. As oppose to what people sometimes say - you do not want to fail! It's very painful!!! You have to understand what failing in a startup means. You can work your a$s for 2-3 years, have little to no salary, waste other people's money (most likely your friends and family first), lose friends, fight with your partners, your family, your spouse, devote 20 hours a day for your startup all this time, forget about the little and big things you used to enjoy in life, and only then, after debating 100 times whether you should quit or not, you finally decide that it's not gonna work and you've failed. Disappointing your family, your investors, yourself. Trust me it is painful. Are you sure you wanna do this to yourself? If yes, give me a call. I have the experience you need! From idea stage, to proof of concept, to running beta tests, getting millions of millions of users in ways you can't even imagine, creating features and experience that will make these millions of users completely addicted and viral, raise money in a smart way, hire the right people, find a great co-founder, succeed, fail, be persistent, and enjoy the ride! Good luck, Roy

For software development business LinkedIn ads, content marketing and Google Adwords don't work well. The best and most cost effective method is email outreach. Try to find the contacts of key decision makers in Bay Area from your target companies. You want to present yourselves as custom mobile and web development specialists and highlight your core competencies to get an initial call to discuss their mobile strategy or software development needs. Attaching your case studies how you helped other similar businesses and your portfolio can be extremely helpful as well. Try to always focus on the benefits in you pitch that they can get by working with you and point their missed opportunities of not having certain types of software or apps for their business. Clients love that software development companies have not only strong execution but also ideation skills. Hope this helps. If you have any questions I am also available on call for your convenience.

The best way to build an MVP for any SaaS product is to create a landing page that looks like a real product. Here's an example of one I built. http://www.happiily.com In this case, it advertises the primary features of the product and invites people to sign-up. When they do, they are asked for information which qualifies the person and then sends me an email. I built this quickly and very inexpensively and started getting inbound leads from it shortly thereafter. I got on the phone with each person who signed-up and explained the features I wanted to build and was able to do a lot of customer learning based on that. Happy to talk to you in a call if you'd like to talk more about customer development with SaaS products.

I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).

I've been involved in several projects that hinged upon this question (generally start-ups or web+mobile apps), and it's not a clean or easy answer unfortunately! Plus every developer you talk to is going to try to sell you their services, but what you need is simply the truth! I'd suggest that you consider shifting your focus away from finding a best language. That sort of premise can eliminate options that are actually quite valid solutions. Keep in mind that any mobile app will require multiple languages working in harmony - all while used in a commercially consistent and standards-based manner. That's the part that determines your technical scalability! Almost every programming language can achieve this functionality with an experienced developer on your team. The best advice I can give you, is to consult with at least two people on this, and three if your app is os-specific. The most important insight will come from a "full stack" developer. One who's got a variety of enterprise experience, and can code at all levels of the stack. This person needs to have experience in leading a team of other developers, which forces the strategy of which technologies to use and why onto their plates daily. Secondly, you'll want to consult with a "front end" developer, who can tell you what's possible using advanced OOP JavaScript techniques (like Google's angular.js), because in an absurdly fast change over the past 3 years, much of the formerly back-end work has made it's way to the front-end, and is driven by JavaScript, predominantly JSON data, and awesome API's. The game has changed and the front-enders are the poor souls dealing with this rapid shift daily. To do this, they're also fantastic JavaScript programmers, which is a language that runs on all mobile devices and all browsers, too. Love it or hate it JavaScript is the most commonly used language in the world. Finally, if your app is OS-specific, you'll want to consult with a developer who works predominantly with the OS your app is built for. This person lets you know what's possible from the device POV, should know what stacks and JavaScript approaches can and can't be done on that OS, and how to leverage the resources of the device for your app as well as extend it's functionality. BONUS - loop back to the full stack developer to double-check the claims of the front-ender and the mobile developers. Always double check with your most senior programmer ;) All of these consults together in addition to your own research and due diligence will get you comfortable and allow you to navigate on this rather daunting but deeply important journey. There aren't any turn-key options. Instead it's a series of inter-connected modules driven by different languages, and all working in tandem. Every solution will have bugs, and no one group of technologies can do everything without proper developers. If you'd like to go further down the rabbit hole, then we should definitely set-up some time to speak. Otherwise, I wish you great luck in research and encourage you to learn as much as you can! :) It's going to seem hard, and might give you a headache here or there, but learn everything you can about how different technologies "talk" to each other, and then you will be able to build a map for keeping your app and business scalable regardless of the changing tides of technology!