Comment by jonthepirate

1 month ago

I'm a former Lyft & DoorDash engineer exploiting a talent loophole.

Mission: get startups access to senior & principal big-tech engineers at a 90% discount and without hemorrhaging equity.

The hack is that I'm tapping into a hidden supply of people hiding in plain sight: top engineers that are already full-time employed in big-tech with benefits who enjoy helping smaller startups, and, recently retired people who want something to do.

The name I'm using is Low Touch Advisor because we are selling what I call "low touch" help in the form of async Slack based guidance. By having access to senior people perfectly matched to your team's needs, you can use your actual engineers to do the hands on and majorly reduce the likelihood that a major rewrite is needed after 6 months of effort on new projects.

Basic model: - Our customer (an early stage company) pays $1,500 / month with no long term commitments to get async Slack help from a vetted senior/principal engineer perfectly matched to their needs - Of that, we ACH $1k / month to the engineer who provided the Slack-based help

Within the first 3 months of operating, I have $27k of monthly revenue booked in my sales pipeline.

So far I've done everything by hand but once I'm a bit further ahead, I'm going to look to begin automating this.