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How to Find a CTO for Your Startup: The 2026 Founder’s Guide

When building a startup, you have many options for software development. Whether you leverage an LLM-backed code builder, hire a team of developers, outsource to an agency, or find a CTO. While all of these options are viable, if you find a CTO with the right tech expertise, you’ll have gained a key player to help you succeed. But remember, if you pick the wrong CTO you won’t survive long – you may not even make it to launch. I bet you keep hearing that “Finding your dream CTO is not easy”. It’s true; it takes a lot of time and commitment. That’s why many founders spend years looking for the perfect person for the job, myself included. When I first started founding startups, I experienced the hurdles of finding a CTO first-hand. Over the last 14 years, I have built many projects. It took me more than 30 months and more than 300 headaches before I found the right guy for the job. But when I found him, he nailed it. And he kept on nailing it. Usually, the conflict is: You want to start building your MVP as soon as possible, so you might feel tempted to commit to the first decent […]

Daniel de Castro Ruivo

Looking for Development

The Ultimate Startup Guide: From Ideation to MVP Launch & Beyond [2026]

What’s Different About Building a Startup in 2026 The fundamentals in this guide — founder-market fit, validation, MVP discipline, early users, capital strategy — are unchanged. The execution layer around them, however, looks meaningfully different in 2026 from when this guide was first written. Five shifts worth keeping in mind as you read on: Validation in days, not weeks. Tools like Lovable, v0, Bolt and Replit Agent let non-technical founders ship working prototypes from a prompt, compressing the time between idea and first user feedback dramatically. Expect to test more hypotheses cheaply, not bigger MVPs upfront. AI-augmented engineering is the default. Senior engineers using Cursor, Claude Code or GitHub Copilot Workspace routinely report 30–50% productivity gains on suitable tasks. Smaller teams can credibly take on what used to need 8–12 engineers in 2022. Frontier models are commoditised. GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4 / Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 are roughly interchangeable for most production tasks. “Which model” isn’t a moat — proprietary data, deep workflow integration, distribution and trust are. Agents are production-ready, narrowly. Scoped agentic workflows (research, support triage, internal automation) ship reliably with frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI and n8n. End-to-end “autonomous” narratives are still over-promised — the Klarna agent […]

3 Steps to Build a Successful MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Building a startup! You have an epiphany and say to yourself: This is a great idea! How didn’t anyone think of it before? I have to build it! Now! Fair enough but, as I’m sure you’ve heard, there are many hurdles that can lead to startup failure if you’re not careful — and you want to be among the founders that avoid them. Maybe you’ve already read The Lean Startup. You’re already considering building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and getting your idea tested ASAP. While testing as much as possible (and testing quickly) is vital, should you rush to build the first idea that pops into your mind? The answers you’re looking for are just a few scrolls away! In this article, we will cover everything you need to know from the definition of an MVP to the process of building one. Contents What is an MVP? Before we dive into the benefits of an MVP and how to build an MVP, I wanted to startup off with a quick definition of MVP. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is exactly what it says on the tin: the simplest version of your product with just enough features to validate your value proposition. No one has ever created “X”, I […]

Daniel de Castro Ruivo

Other articles

Why Big Corporations Need Lean Startup Techniques: A Path to Innovation and Growth

In the rapidly evolving business landscape, the mantra “adapt or die” holds more weight than ever. Blackberry and Yahoo serve as a stark reminder: failure to innovate can lead to obsolescence. Regardless of size. In the meantime, it has become increasingly common to witness a startup, now and then, completely revolutionise an industry. Spotify. Netflix. Tesla. Historically, large companies enjoyed a lifespan of around 61 years, a figure now drastically reduced to less than 18 years. This trend signals an alarming rate of corporate mortality, with entities like Enron and Lehman Brothers serving as cautionary tales of stagnation and collapse. More than 50% of established corporations are now expected to leverage lean startup techniques at the business level to increase the pace and success of business transformation. Which is no surprise to me. At Altar.io, we’ve witnessed a surge in interest from major corporations eager to imbue their operations with startup agility and efficiency. This pivot towards Lean Startup methodologies, famously articulated by Eric Ries, emphasises validated learning, iterative development, and customer-centric strategies. While these principles are synonymous with startups, their relevance and potential benefits for established corporations are undeniable. In an era marked by digital disruption and fiercely heightened competition, this strategic […]

The Startup Journey Interviews

Navigating Rapid Startup Growth: Bootstrapped Beginnings to Y Combinator Success

In the realm of the modern software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup, data is the currency of choice. Yet, despite its value, the path from data to actionable insights is often fraught with complexity. Enter Vizzly, the entrepreneurial vision of Matt Williamson, a first-time founder with an extensive background in business development and product having worked at Skyscanner & Duffel. In Matt’s own words, Vizzly is “in the business of making data accessible and digestible through customer-facing dashboards. Our target users are B2B SaaS apps, and marketplaces that prioritize data transparency with their external stakeholders.” Matt and his team had the experience to pull off this idea and had found a gap in the market that was ripe for a solution – a perfect storm for the potential of entrepreneurial success. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Y Combinator was keen to interview them. Recently, I was lucky enough to sit down with Matt to explore his journey building Vizzly and Y Combinator’s pivotal role in increasing his chances of success. It’s clear from our conversation that his unique blend of seasoned industry insights and entrepreneurial drive has been instrumental in crafting Vizzly’s trajectory. Moreover, it underscores the Y Combinator experience as a crucible for […]

Jamie Russell-Curtis

The Startup Journey Interviews

The Startup Journey Interviews

Raising $3.3M Pre-Launch & Completing Y Combinator to Bridge Europe & Africa’s Financial Chasm (Founder Story)

When it comes to the startup world, every entrepreneur has a unique journey filled with ups, downs and a whole lot of learning. One of the big decisions along the way is whether to join a startup accelerator. A choice that isn’t just about funding. It’s about tapping into a reservoir of resources, mentorship, and a network that could significantly shorten the steep learning curve that most entrepreneurs face. Today, I’m sharing an open conversation I recently had with Bilal Dahlab, an entrepreneur who tackled the decision firsthand and went on to take part in Y Combinator. Bilal’s path shifted from financial consulting to launching Moneco, a fintech startup aimed at easing the process of setting up a bank account and making international money transfers for the African diaspora living in Europe. In this candid chat, Bilal shares his experiences with Y Combinator. He talks about why he chose this path, the doors it opened, and the community he became a part of. His story is a blend of ambition, learning, and the power of a supportive network. Bilal also dishes out some solid advice for aspiring entrepreneurs considering the accelerator route. Through his narrative, we get a glimpse into the real-world […]

Jamie Russell-Curtis

The Startup Journey Interviews

How OpenAI Found Success by Being Product Driven (And How You Can Too)

Is this [ChatGPT product release from OpenAI] a pivotal moment? Out of all the GPT versions, 50 years from now when they look back on an early system that was really kind of a leap. This was the question posed by AI researcher Lex Fridman in a conversation with Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator and current CEO of OpenAI. Altman’s response encapsulates the essence of what truly makes a product successful: It wasn’t the underlying model that mattered, it was the usability of it, both the RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) and the interface to it. These words underscore the fundamental belief that the core success of a startup is intimately linked to how your product delivers a valuable experience to its users. Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a prime example, I wanted to use this article to delve into these crucial aspects of product development in a Startup. Contents Product Timing The success of a startup often hinges on timing. YouTube, for instance, was founded when Adobe’s Flash Video player was gaining rapid popularity. This technological trend created the perfect environment for a user-friendly platform for easy video sharing. Similarly, Google’s development of transformer models was foundational to […]

Azamat Tyulebayev

Looking for Development

A Tech Founder’s Perspective on Collaborating with a Software Development Company

I’m an entrepreneur and investor who’s spent the last 20 years working my way through the entrepreneurial journey. In that time, I’ve also become an investor and advisor to several startups. My latest venture is Ovvio. Our platform was a pandemic baby that was born out of a need to connect humans with other humans to solve daily tasks with the help of someone else’s knowledge. Technology has long been a passion of mine and, while I have some tech experience, my co-founder and I quickly realised that building the MVP for Ovvio with an in-house team may not be the best way to validate our assumptions and get to market quickly. In this article, I’ll explore how we made the decision to build the first version of Ovvio with a software development company. I’ll also cover how my co-founder and I went through the due diligence process and vetted potential agencies to ensure we found the right partner for us. Finally, I’ll share some tips and tricks for setting up the founder-agency relationship the right way, so you can increase your chances of success should you decide to build your startup with an outsourced partner But first, I’d like to give you […]

Looking for Development

The Most Exciting Updates Announced at Figma Config 2023

Last week, I attended Figma’s annual design conference, Figma Config, to learn about all the innovative updates they’re bringing to the platform. As a senior UX/UI designer with added experience in visual design content and web development, I’m used to pushing Figma to its limit to help drive projects forward. At Altar, Figma is an essential part of our product creation process. It’s the ultimate meeting point for almost all stakeholders involved in the project: the design team, the managers, the clients, the developers, the product team and many more. Figma has always been a fantastic tool to craft, share and iterate on designs. But with such a diverse range of people working on a single project, communication can sometimes become a hurdle. For this reason, I was delighted to learn that the focus of Figma Config 2023 was to optimise their design tool to make it accessible for all. This will bridge the gap between design, product, development teams and non-technical stakeholders, allowing the delivery of projects to be faster and more seamless. At Config 2023, Figma announced a whole host of new features from tiny, quality-of-life improvements like Font Picker and Flex-Wrap to actual beasts like Dev Mode (which I’ll […]

Ewa Hendrychowska