Topic: New Project Advice (Read 210 times)

This is one of those qualities I look for when investing in any project. When I mean communicate I don't just look at the greeting every morning from community managers I look at the technical communications, the ones only investors will understand the values, I look at how responsive community managers are, knowing the project that pick road side managers and those that actually hired those that does the job like their life's depends on it.
It's very important to communicate to your investors and any project that don't have that feature, isn't worth my money.

I originally thought about posting this in Beginners and Help, but this really isn't a discussion topic for that. This is more for people who are serious about starting projects, and this is some advice I bring to the table after joining two teams and helping out as a Web Dev + DevOps leader. In total, I have been in on 3 projects, before the pre-ico, private sale, or whatever you want to call it, has started. This is a little different than my other thread though, as I would like for this to be a discussion point between users, what they have seen, and what works versus what does not work. Below are a few key points that I have come across throughout my short time working in this area. Some of the issues I have come across could be a product of the quality of the team members available to the project.

One of the biggest things I have come to take away from joining projects before they even have a website for their projects is this:
Spend money to make money. Start your project off right by going down the right path of development with your servers. Both projects I am currently a part of have issues spending $25 a month on quality cloud hosting with the ability to have it easily expand as needed once that need is there. They would rather go with free options with minimal features and flip between servers, OS, and software than to have the infrastructure set up properly and ready for expansion in the future. I find this to be a poor choice because it only creates more work for the dev team in the future when they have to migrate servers, or even change hosting platforms because of the choices made in the very early stages of development. This also creates unnecessary downtime for the consumer, which is never a good thing as well.

The other extremely important point I want to touch upon is communication. You need to be an effective communicator if you want to be a part of the core team. This goes without saying that you need to be able to read, write, and listen effectively. Without a clear understanding of what someone else is saying, or being unable to articulate your point(s) clearly, leads to downfall. Of the two projects I am currently on, both of them have issues trying to clearly communicate. There is also issues of not having a clear path set for objectives, and this is an issue too as you need them defined and not to be hopping from one idea to the next. I was a member of another project with a lot of funding that I am no longer involved with, largely due to communication issues. There was a complete lack of communication at times, team members contracted each other on everything, and there were blatant lies being told, even in my termination correspondence (which I was able to easily verify with another member).

So, my advice to those looking to start a project:
Set your goals early. It is okay if your goals change, or timelines change, but do not flip flop between ideas one week to the next. Spend the money on your server infrastructure and get things set up for easy expansion and create less work for your team in the future. Lastly, communicate, communicate, and communicate.