Matt Watson

Full Scale

We started Full Scale to do software development the right way from the Philippines. Our 300+ employees are helping dozens of companies build their software quickly and affordably.

* Philippines based, English fluency is superb!
* Staff augmentation model, our team works directly for you!
* Focused on senior level developers
* No middle man project managers in the way

Founder, CEO, CTO

Startup Hustle

Podcast about entrepreneurship with over 6 million downloads! We interview entrepreneurs and others related to the startup ecosystem.

Podcast & Newsletter

At Capacity

The only smart ads platform for home services. We turn search ads off when our customers have full schedules or are "At Capacity". We turn their ads on and advertise special offers when they need more customers.

CAMP Digital

Leading the development and product teams to help take CAMP to the next level. CAMP Digital is the industry leader in digital marketing for home services. We have the unique ability to dynamically change ad campaigns based on the capacity of our customers.

Stackify

Stackify (sold 2021 to Netreo, then to BMC in 2024) provides the ultimate combination of tools for developers to monitor and troubleshoot their applications. We combine application performance monitoring (APM) with server monitoring, app metrics, advanced error tracking, and log management in a single, easy to use platform for developers.

Founder, CEO

VinSolutions

One of two original founders of the company in 2003. Started the company with the simple goal of helping car dealers upload car photos to the internet and syndicate them to internet classified websites. Over many years the product rapidly expanded in to an inventory management, website, CRM, and internet marketing product. VinSolutions became the market leading CRM solutions for car dealers with thousands of customers. I provided most of the product vision for the entire suite of products and as CTO was in charge of all product and software development.

Founder, Chief Technology Officer

Physicians Reference Laboratory

Designed and developed laboratory information systems

Senior Architect & Lead Developer

Ticket Solutions

Designed and developed software for tracking and retailing tickets

Senior Application Developer

Serial Entrepreneur, Startup CTO, Podcaster, Blogger @ VisionaryCTO.com

I have 20+ years of experience as a SaaS startup CTO/CEO. I have founded 4 tech companies including VinSolutions which was bootstrapped and exited for $150M in 2011.

I also founded Full Scale that employs 300+ talented software developers. We do work for 60+ startups and tech companies. Our team is based in the Philippines and we augment your teams to scale up development.

My expertise is in SaaS, startups, and product development. I love advising and talking to other entrepreneurs.

I co-host a podcast called Startup Hustle that is focused on entrepreneurship.

I write a weekly newsletter about startup and CTO life called Visionary CTO.

A friend told me how bad choices by a previous CTO have wrecked his startup.  
  
As software developers, we love to play with shiny new toys.  
  
Be it microservices, NoSQL, serverless, Kubernetes, React, Kafka, AI, or whatever the latest trend is.  
  
We want to keep up with the latest technologies.  
  
Some developers are like fanboys of these things and will do anything to try and use them!  
  
However, just because Uber was stupid enough to make 900 microservices, it doesn't mean you should.  
  
My friend's company has millions in revenue a year but spends most of its development time rewriting its software due to the old CTO's tech stack decisions.  
  
My suggestion...  
  
Your best bet is to use a boring SQL database and monolith with a boring app stack.  
  
Use what you know and be very cautious using a startup to go all in on microservices, NoSQL, or whatever you are excited about.  
  
Every new technology has a use case.  
  
You must keep your software as simple as possible until you have a very specific use case where you must use those technologies.  
  
My last company had use cases for Kafka and microservices.   
  
But not until we scaled way up, and it was a necessity and only then for specific projects.

Alexey Krivitsky 🌈

I sold my company today! 

Today, it was announced that BMC Software has acquired Netreo, which previously acquired my company, Stackify by Netreo.

How does it feel? 😁 

Stackify is an application monitoring solution for developers. It is a really cool product, but we never had the funding to go big and compete with the likes of New Relic, Datadog, etc.

I am excited to see what BMC does with it. Hopefully, they will make big investments in it and make it an industry-leading solution!

Everyone wants to see their baby grow up and do big things. 

Go, baby, go! 🚀 

Link to the PR: https://lnkd.in/gjYGTKMk

Software developers who work remotely need to be good at something that is easier to overcome when working in the office.
 
My company has 300 employees working 100% remotely. 
 
We understand this problem.
 
When we hire developers, we are looking for strong technical experience, problem-solving, critical thinking, etc.
 
𝗛𝗼𝘄𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿, 𝗻𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗼𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘀. 
 
Developers have to be good at these three things to work remotely effectively:
 
⚡Asking the right clarifying questions
 
⚡Responsiveness to the rest of the team
 
⚡ Over-communicate status updates on work
 
I picked these three specific things because they are mission-critical if you work remotely.
 
Working in an office makes it easier to holler across a cubicle at someone and overcome all these challenges.
 
Working remotely requires over-communication. It is especially important to confirm information and ask clarifying questions.
 
Some of you are hyper-focused on hiring a developer with five years of experience with a JavaScript framework that someone can learn in a week. 
 
Instead, focus on someone with strong communication skills who can quickly learn new things. 
 
Those are the developers we hire at Full Scale

Mário M.

Carolina Powers

CTO's job: 
How do we architect this thing? 
 
Not CTO's job: 
Writing all the code. 
 
CTO's job: 
Why will customers love it? 
 
Not CTO's job: 
Talking to every customer. 
 
CTO's job: 
Building and mentoring the tech team. 
 
Not CTO's job: 
Micromanaging the development team’s daily activities. 
 
CTO's job: 
Ensuring scalability and security from the start. 
 
Not CTO's job: 
Configuring every server and firewall manually. 
 
CTO's job: 
Communicating the technological capabilities and vision to stakeholders. 
 
Not CTO's job: 
Fielding all tech support calls. 
 
𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙙𝙞𝙙 𝙄 𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙨?

My friend's startup is going to fail for the same 3 reasons most startups fail: 
 
⚡ Chasing investors instead of customers 
 
⚡ Founder doesn't want to do sales 
 
⚡ Too focused on building the perfect product 
 
As a product guy myself, it is easy to want to focus on building the world's perfect product. 
 
Unless the product sells itself incredibly well, sales and marketing are always the bigger challenge.

👉 Join 20,000 others for my weekly newsletter about startups: https://lnkd.in/g_-33vr9

𝗜 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆. This week sucks. 
A customer canceled. 
An employee resigned. 
Someone left a bad review. 
My kids are driving me crazy. 
A new hire didn't accept a job offer. 
Our new marketing campaign didn't work. 
I didn't accomplish my top goal for the week. 
 
Sounds like hell, right? 
 
Actually, this is a pretty normal week as a business leader. All the shit rolls uphill to us. 
 
How we respond to it is the key. On this Friday, I feel defeated.  
 
I feel like doing nothing, a nap or a massage. Literally anything but working. 
 
I know I'm not the only one. If you are feeling the same way today, I feel you. 
 
Being self-aware of work-life balance is important. Sometimes we have to recharge and continue the fight another day.  
 
Uncle!

I don't want AI to build software. That is the fun part.  
 
I want AI to replace the customers.  
 
They are a pain in the neck and hard to find. 😂

Working from home is still the future. The bigger and more congested big cities get, the more that commute times matter. 
 
This picture is from the Philippines. It's not uncommon to commute one way to work 1+ hours. 
 
That is 2+ hours a day of time you could have spent with your family. 
 
Nothing is more important than family time. 
 
We proudly have 300 employees working from home. 💚 
 
Why? Because we care about the families of our employees.

This software looks like crap. That didn't prevent it from becoming the #1 solution in the industry. 
 
After 13 years, this product barely looks different and is used by roughly 40% of car dealerships in the USA. 
 
User experience matters, and trends change over time. 
 
It all starts with solving business problems, no matter what it looks like. 
 
I'm not a UX designer and I designed this monstrosity. 😱 
 
Looking back... it looks awful. But the functionality was ahead of its time. 
 
We ultimately sold VinSolutions for a 9 figure exit in 2011.

I talked to a first time CTO today about what is different compared to be a software engineer. I love his answer! 
 
He said he had to go from focusing on the work to focusing on the outcome of the work. 🎯 
 
I wish every software developer thought this way. 💚

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿: 
Years of experience 
Where they went to college 
What companies they used to work at 
LeetCode 
Github profile activity 
Tech conferences attended 
 
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿: 
Communication skills 
Critical thinking 
Problem solving 
Ability to learn new things 
Collaboration and teamwork 
Gives a shit 
 
What did I miss?

If you can fix technical debt in one day, it's not technical debt.  
  
That is just a days worth of work.  
  
Technical debt is a big giant problem that people talk about at board meetings because it's a major obstacle to company growth or objectives.  
  
Not writing documentation, adding tests, or refactoring some code isn't technical debt.   
  
Nobody is going to talk about that at the board meeting.  
  
It's just work to be done.  
  
Real technical debt takes weeks to fix and is a real risk to the business.  
 
Otherwise, it is just maintenance work.

I need to hire offshore software developers for my startup. 
 
Where should I hire them? 
 
How do I trust them? 
 
How do I make this work?

CTO: 
Chief TypeScript Officer 
Chief Trello Officer 
Chief Troubleshooting Officer 
 
Let's be real for a minute.  
 
𝗜𝗻 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽, 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝗯.  
 
In a big company, that isn't the job at all.  
 
It turns into strategy, politics, and meetings. 
 
Which CTO would you rather be?

Meta
Apple
Amazon
Netflix
Google 
OpenAI

Goodbye FAANG! Hello, MAANGO!

🥭

"I used an offshore team to do a project and had to rework the whole thing" 
 
This is a common problem when people outsource development, not hire globally. 
 
This is usually one of two potential problems: 
 
#1: No technical leadership 
 
I see this problem a lot when a company truly outsources a project, and they have no technical leadership in-house. 
 
This bites non-technical founders a lot. 
 
They don't know how to build software, so they 100% trust the lowest-cost dev shop they can find. 
 
Companies always need technical leadership, even if it is a fractional CTO or consultant to lead the project. 
 
#2: Not integrating the teams 
 
The right way to do offshore development is to integrate the developers with the rest of your teams, using staff augmentation. 
 
You can't treat them like a separate team and throw stuff over the wall at them and expect good results. 
 
I had great success doing offshore before when my local developers were the team leads, and they managed hybrid teams of both local and offshore developers. 
 
They were all one team working together. 
 
If things weren't being done correctly, you would know that week, not at the end of some project, that you would have to rework. 
 
--- 
 
Most companies use offshore to save money.
 
The key is doing it the right way. 
 
You always need technical leadership in-house and you want to use a staff augmentation model to integrate the offshore developers like they are your own employees. 
 
If your team works well remotely, it will work well globally, too. 

Need help? Full Scale can help.

Here is what happens when a company has no real tech leadership, but has developers:
 
💩 Lack of requirements
💩 Communication problems
💩 Bad architecture decisions
💩 Priorities change every week
💩 Projects don't get done quickly
💩 Lack of proper quality assurance
 
It's 💩 storm.
 
How do I know this? At Full Scale we work with dozens of companies and have been through this multiple times with our clients.
 
Every company needs a strong product owner, lead developer, CTO, or someone who knows how to run dev projects.
 
If not, it can cause a lot of chaos.
 
So much so, we don't typically work with clients who don't have in-house technical leadership.
 
Can't afford a full-time technical leadership? Hire a fractional CTO. I can recommend some.

I screwed up my job. I delegated all the things I love to do. Guess what I am left with? 
 
This is a common problem for a lot of managers. 
 
We understand the importance of delegation. It is critical for success as a leader! 
 
But we could delegate what we enjoy if we aren't careful. 
 
If we do that, we won't be happy and will quickly burn out. 
 
Be mindful to stay involved in parts of your job that bring you happiness and motivate you. 
 
𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘇𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗶𝘂𝘀. 
 
Otherwise, you might end up in the zone of incompetence.... better known as work hell.

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