Background: Non-technical solo founder that used an outsourced team to develop MVP.
Product: Social Financial Planning platform. It guides you through creating models for scenarios and scores their chance of success. You can then share these models / comparisons with the community for suggestions of how to do better or just to make a model-backed point.
Stage: MVP is live and garnering some actionable user feedback. Iteration on feedback is slow due to the outsourced nature of talent as well as a reduction in allocated hours (I communicated to the team that I wanted to slow down development to have user feedback direct subsequent releases)
Issues: There is nobody in my immediate circle I can bring on as a technical co-founder, CTO, tech lead. I am hoping to hire someone for a 6-month contract who will PM with the outsourced talent as well as bring some of the development in-house. The intention of this 6 month period is to find my technical partner. I plan to list the job at a competitive market rate as I am very eager to not be alone in this, but I would greatly prefer someone innately passionate about the problem as I am.
I would like to focus on user growth, monetization, and fundraising. The rate I plan to advertise for the 6-month prospective stretches my personal budget.
Questions:
-As desperate as I am for a cofounder, should I instead advertise a more average market rate to filter for potential applicants that might be more passionate about the project and interested in equity? My worry is if it's just purely an attractive salary, I cannot sustain it past 6-months and their continued employment would be contingent on fundraising.
-The product is financial planning with social and content features, the latter being underdeveloped. As a result, retention is low due to the fact that financial planning is something you do infrequently. The idea to boost leads and retention is to have content published on and using the platform. I plan to do this in the next few months - get content creators to produce their videos using the product, publish our own content, grow users. I want to fundraise, but the underwhelming retention and engagement lead me to believe that I shouldn't do so until I fix this issue. Would you agree?
-Monetization is down the line as I didn't want obstacles to user growth. Given it is an MVP with known bugs on production, it feels early to monetize via subscription for premium features. Given I don't have a direct customer value, it feels like I need to just guerilla market as opposed to paying for help since my short-term CAC is far greater than my non-existent CLV. Keep in mind, there is no external funding at this point. Is it far too early to do paid marketing for the product?
Sorry if the above is rambly. It seems like a bunch of chicken and the egg problems and I was just looking for guidance as I'm somewhat uncertain of the next steps.
-I want to fundraise to pay for technical talent and marketing (getting hard on my personal budget)
-I want to do paid marketing to improve user count and get better feedback. (I have barely begun marketing on my own, but I am not a natural talent at it)
-I want technical talent to improve iteration time on user feedback, and reduce friction points that hurt user acquisition and retention. ( I can see where in the user journey people are sticking, I wish I could fix them faster and work on developing features that not just improve the user's experience, but make it easier to grow)
-I want user growth, retention, and engagement to fundraise better.
Anyway, thanks for listening to that somewhat rambly post. If anyone can see a clear path forward or thinks there are details to focus on would provide such clarity, I'm all ears. It's tough being solo sometimes without someone to bounce ideas off of.
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