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Team Building: What does your a team look like for a software company of ten or less people? Or, how do you think it should be?
KM
KM
Kevin McCarthy - Founder, BlindSpots.com, Human Behavior Consultant, Leadership & Teamwork answered:

I've been involved in three different software startups. My first was completely bootstrapped on a credit card. I sold it during the dotcom era for a low 7 digit figure. My second was building a new division for an existing venture. We had completely in-house staff. I managed 54 people on my team. I currently am helping another start up software company. We just launched a SaaS product.

It is a bit difficult to give you a good answer to your question without knowing more about the project. Nonetheless, here are a few things to consider:

1. If your product is ready for market, sales and marketing should be your focus. How you allocate to these roles largely depends on your product and budget. If your product is sexy enough and your sales funnels sticky enough, you might allocate more to marketing and less to a staffed sales force.

2. Do you have enough sales to justify a full-time support person? If not, that person might be able to handle Q/A when not interacting with a customer.

3. Bookkeeping and accounting can easily be outsourced, at least in the beginning. There are good online services for managing your sales transactions on the front end.

4. You might consider outsourcing your wireframing until you are at a place where you have the cash flow and customer base to justify keeping someone busy full time with all your iterations.

5. If you are considering offshore outsourcing, we need to talk. I've been using onshore and offshore for the past four years consistently. I can save you lots of time and money from the lessons I've learned.

Let's schedule a concise call. I can definitely help you on this project.

All the best!

Kevin McCarthy

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