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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

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A Software Development Agency Must Challenge A Startup Founder

As the founder of a Product & Software Development Agency, I learnt a long time ago that aligning with a startup founder’s vision is crucial. However, to truly deliver great results it’s important to challenge founders’ ideas so that the product being built can grow and improve. At Altar.io, we often challenge the assumptions of the founders we work with. Some think this is a risk. That it will intimidate or even threaten a potential client and stop them working with us. In our experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth and, in the long run, has a positive effect for both us and the client. In this article, I am going to outline why challenging ideas and assumptions can be beneficial for both Software Development Agencies and Startup Founders. Benefits For The Startup Founder In a startup environment, the risk is that (most of the time) you may not have the resources to recover from partnering with the wrong agency. This makes choosing the right one vital for survival. Related: How to Outsource Software Development Successfully Often a more “salesy” agency will say yes to every request you make – greedy to increase its client base and quickly produce […]

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Looking for Investors? Avoid These 7 Types of Bad Business Angels

You’re building your tech venture and looking for investors, but it’s still too early to approach Venture Capitalists (VCs). So you decide, instead, to fill your next months’ calendar with meetings with Business Angels. Great! Business Angels are a group of investors consisting of many amazing professionals who are a positive force for the startup sector’s advancement. But, as we often see at Altar.io, too often Founders struggle with Bad Investors. If you want to avoid Bad Business Angels this will help you understand and spot the most common profiles. Here are the time-waster profiles you should steer clear from as soon as you spot them. Bad Business Angels profiles and how to spot them The Out of Touch The Conglomerate Builder The Shark The Sheep The ROI Obsessed The Co-Founder The Hands-On Related: Startup Series Funding: Everything You Need To Know The Out of Touch This Business Angel is possibly an older manager who had a great career in Telco or Investment Banking. He knows a lot about Management, Supply Chain, Distribution, Finance, even HR but probably never ran his own company, much less a Tech company. He will struggle to understand the dynamics of setting up and launching an online product, a tech workplace and an online distribution platform. Moreover, […]

Proptech 3.0 and The Rise of Crypto Securitization in Real Estate

Proptech or Real Estate Technology has had several stages in its yet short-lived existence. The consensus is that soon we will have more startups that will automate several processes in time-consuming and expensive usages. But the truly revolutionary aspect will be the advent of Crypto Securitization. According to Oxford’s Said Business School Proptech Report, we are now charging ahead towards new ventures aimed at reaching Proptech 3.0. This could bring along sophisticated asset analytics and even trading capabilities that could make real estate significantly more liquid. To an extent that might make it almost as liquid as financial assets via crypto securitization. It will be the financial sector (Fintech and Crypto Tech) leading the way and real estate (Proptech) will keep being a use case scenario for many of the novelties coming from them. Some innovations in Proptech, such as deploying smart energy production or consumption analysis will however not be in any way related to Fintech. Hence proving that Proptech is not under the Fintech umbrella but rather at the intersection of different segments. PropTech 1.0 Proptech 1.0 is really about the inception of the usage of technology to list and analyse real estate assets. Websites from realtors and aggregators such as Zillow.com in the US, Rightmove.co.uk have been providing essential […]

Angulartics2 – A Powerful Analytics tool for Angular Applications

We’ve created the open-source library Angulartics2 to plug into your Angular single-page app (SPA) for analytics integration. It allows you to do event tracking and it is ready to integrate with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel, Piwik, Segment, Baidu Analytics and Facebook Pixel. Problem Most analytics providers do not automatically track the browser’s navigation history, making it difficult to track single-page applications (SPAs) like Angular applications. Simple Solution To tackle this problem we developed a simple open-source library called Angulartics2. By plugging Angulartics2 in your Angular apps it will automatically track navigation events and send them to your plugged-in Provider, such as Google Analytics. Angulartics2 also comes with easy ways to send custom events to your providers enabling you to easily send any kind of event such as when your users buy an article or download a file. This is mostly useful for tracking conversion within your apps. Diving into some simple code snippets Plugging Angulartics2 into your Angular app is simple and similar to any other module You have to import Angulartics2Module.forRoot() into your main module and pass an array with the providers you are using. Then, in you main component you need to pass each provider to the component constructor function. And that’s it, you now have automatic page tracking. Make […]

Hutsi – The Marketing Automation AI Tool We Created From Head to Toe

Are You Relevant To Your Customers and Leads? When we think about the future of marketing we must immediately think about being 100% relevant. Utopia or not, the brands nailing the marketing automation today are already highly relevant to their customers. They are able to deliver the right content at the right time, through the right channel. Well crafted Marketing automation not only enhances ROI but it also raises brand awareness. This means a consumer/customer tends to receive less spam, receiving instead what he wants – when he wants – in the correct context. This applies to both B2C and B2B! Hutsi is a marketing automation AI platform we created. It allows companies to deliver online and offline cross-channel campaigns seamlessly to thousands of customers. Using customer interaction information to constantly adapt campaigns in real-time to each customer. Thus maximizing relevance and ROI. So, let’s now go through the different key points of the platform: Customer Story Create Engagement Material Advanced Segmentation Proactive Intelligence Advanced Analytics All the following examples are built around a coupon campaign for an FMCG (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods – known as CPG in the US) company. Related: How to Build a Marketplace [A Startup Case Study] 1. Customer Story Customer Story is used by […]

Daniel de Castro Ruivo

The Well-Performing Digital Team for Your Agile Projects

Great! You’re adopting an agile methodology for your digital project. However, you don’t know how to structure an effective team capable of executing and delivering good quality on schedule. You are also unsure of the characteristics of such a team We often hear about the greater advantages of the Agile philosophy compared to the “traditional” waterfall approach. In which you plan and execute a long-term project that is complete on the day of release. Very few times, however, do we hear about the team characteristics that will best fit projects using the Agile philosophy. Many times, when consulting with Altar.io, I’ve met corporate managers trying to find the best team structure for their innovative projects. A Flexible Team Might Be The Answer On the one hand, at a corporate level, my first suggestion is this. If your core business is not a tech-related one, you shouldn’t hire tech talents on a full-time basis. One option is to set up an internal team of contractors (if there’s an experienced project manager within your firm). The other is to outsource to an agile consultancy agency. Just make sure they have a proven track record and experience on a project basis. On the other […]