[james-revisoai]

You likely have the skills to get a product out the door, especially if you find a way to step back or have someone ask you diligently "can we skip this", "can we not reinvent this", "is this overengineering?", "what's the one we should prioritise, and the one we should drop?'. Especially if you've been doing ML research and fiddling about - there is limited time for that.

The problems you might have are along the lines of when you get lots of customers. Scaling is horrible for tech, especially anything involving cloud quota requests or newer libraries. You will have the secondary issue of customer support, which at first you can deal with, but quickly can zap 50% of your productivity due to random requests. For CTOs, try and get a reliable dev on your team to take increasing support workload, or hire a dedicated support role.

The two problems you face as a succeeding CTO are quite different. So really do ask yourself how you would handle the customer support issues. The type of startup matters here. Is this urgent for every client, if it breaks? How would you feel if a ping came in at 10:40pm? If your great 5* rating drops to 4* because of bad support, who takes responsibility? Do you entrust your CEO to understand the importance of segmenting support duties from development to ensure your velocity can stay decent?

+ add on presentation and graph making skills if you are raising investment