You can’t tell if your developers are telling you the truth.“It’s nearly done” is not a status update.Your runway is burning on a build nobody has checked.Every month you build the wrong thing costs you a month of runway.Your investor asked one technical question. You froze.You cannot raise a round on “my developer handles that”.The agency stopped replying. Nobody has the passwords.They called it a handover. It was a zip file.
Neither can most founders. Twelve questions to send your dev team this week, with what a good answer sounds like and what should worry you.If you can’t verify progress, you’re not managing a build, you’re hoping. Twelve questions that make the real state of your product visible in an afternoon.The demo looked fine. That’s not the same as the architecture being fine. Twelve questions that surface the difference before your next raise.Twelve questions to ask this week, while changing your mind is still cheap. Six pages, no jargon, free.You don’t need to become an engineer. You need twelve answers ready, and a way to tell whether the ones you’re given are any good.Board-ready technical answers without a full-time hire. Twelve questions, what a good answer sounds like, and what should worry you.Work out exactly what you own before you hire anyone else. Twelve questions covering accounts, data, code and everything you paid for.Twelve questions that show you what you actually got for your money, and what’s missing.
- Twelve questions, grouped into visibility, ownership, resilience and continuity
- A good answer and a red flag for each, so you can judge the reply without being technical
- A scoring page that tells you whether you have gaps or a problem
Four things you are entitled to know about your own product.
Progress you cannot verify is not progress. Three questions that separate a view of the work from a summary of it.
Accounts, data and third-party services. The section founders skip, and the one that hurts when a relationship ends.
Backups, single points of failure and growth. Not whether it will break, but whether anyone has thought about it.
Most early products depend on one or two people. That is normal. Not knowing how much depends on them is not.
A date, and how long the restore took. Someone has actually tried it.
“We have backups.” A backup nobody has restored is a theory, not a safety net.
- You are paying for development you cannot personally assess
- An agency, freelancer or single developer holds the keys
- You have investors asking questions you cannot answer
- You already have a CTO you trust
- You write the code yourself
Reasonable questions
Good ones enjoy it. Every question is about the system, not the person, and most teams answer eight or nine from memory.
Yes. No call required to receive it. If you want a second opinion on the answers afterwards, that conversation is free too.
Send them over. On a 30-minute call I will tell you which gaps matter at your stage and which you can safely ignore, including if the answer is that you do not need us.
Twelve questions. One afternoon. A much clearer picture.
Free. If the answers worry you, bring them to me afterwards and we will work out which gaps actually matter.