The Three Nasi Lemak Team

Most of you Amazon/AWS fans have heard of 2 pizza teams. Well, for those of you who haven't, basically is a guide that a team should consists no more than what you can feed with 2 pizzas.. somewhere around 10-12 people.

For me, the 2 pizza team is not suitable for startup. This is because:

1. We do not have 10-12 people working with us in the beginning, especially at the conceptual level. Most of our teams are 1,2, or 3 people. If we get lucky, we get our family, friends, neighbors, or even pets such as fish and cats to help us out to do our startup activities.

2. Second, pizza is too expensive. Especially in this part of the country where buying pizza is a luxury thing. On average, you need to spend about RM 30 per pizza. This is just too much money to spend for a small team of 1 or 2 for lunch.

3. Third, we don't need to buy 2 pizza. We can only buy 1... for 3 people.

Ok. Enough of that. Let's see why we need a small team, and a small budget to feed the small team. And that is always scalable and works even if you have bigger teams.

1. A startup need minimum 1 person to start, which is the founder. For him, he can write a program, debug, test, release and maintain. Everything with just on his bare hands, a decent laptop and access to the cloud computing. Of course, this is a rare case. But normally, a typical startup starts with 2-3 people bouncing ideas, - the co-founders. Do you really need 2 pizza boxes for lunch ? Not really. Maybe 1 is enough. Or why not try buying nasi lemak for each three of you?

2. I think the best way to write software is to collaborate with your friends. I found joy and amusement when learning from each other. But how many people that you usually collaborate efficiently ? I would say between 2-3 people. Yes, even in large software, most of the time, the contributors are few. The rest are either doing some support work, juniors you need to train, testers, document writers, etc.

2. If all we need is about 2-3 people to write good software at minimum, why not making it a rule? A simple rule that states that, a minimum working software is between 3 people : 2 people working on development, 1 person on everything else - ranging from UI feedback, hiring part timers, managing finances, doing advertising, documentation.. etc. The third person can also write the code, maybe end-to-end tests automation.

I call this rule, The Three Nasi Lemak Team rule. A team that can be fed with only 3 nasi lemak (usually , we can consume nasi lemak during breakfast, because during lunch, we're busy coding).

It's small enough team to run a startup, cheap enough to buy food (a typical nasi lemak costing you not more than RM 3, but it could go as low as RM 1). It fits a startup who just getting started.

At startup time, we just can't be spending too much on Pizzas.