Launch HN: PlatoHQ (YC W16) – Mentorship for Engineers

Hi HN! We are the cofounders of PlatoHQ ( https://www.platohq.com ) and we come from an Engineering Background. After having graduated from college, with two of my engineers friends, we decided to build our own company (the name of our company was Birdly). We made a lot of mistakes along the way; and one of the biggest was to hire too soon a bunch of engineers. We were all three technical cofounders so we could have built the MVP ourselves. But instead of that, we decided that two cofounders over three would do the “Product management” and “Marketing", and that we should hire 3 engineers (including 2 interns) to code the product for us. That was before YC. YC could have prevented us from making that mistake. And this had been our worst mistake. We transitioned from “Individual Contributor” to “Engineering Managers”. We happened to spend more time doing “management” than building the product and optimizing for product-market fit. We were doing the rookie mistakes most fir