This is an incredibly common story among people in tech who learn the skills to build great things and believe that's enough to start a company. Being good at building tech is only half the story. You can write the best code, build the best apps, and design the most amazing UX, but if you can't market your business and sell to people you won't make any money. To run a successful company you need to be good at getting your message in front of people who buy what you're selling.
I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.
As awful as that sounds to many people it just isn't enough to build an amazing product, write great code, or design something beautiful. You need to be able to get out there and tell people it exists in order to succeed. Without that ability your startup will fail. In fact, in my experience at least, far more companies fail because they couldn't reach customers than fail because they couldn't build something. Building something is the easy bit.
Startups do two things: they build product and they sell it (get people to use it).
A lot of non-technical aspiring entrepreneurs miss this point. They think that you build a product and you do "business stuff". They fail to realize that "business stuff" invariably boils down to one thing: sales (at least in the early days of the company).
I think the two most desired skills in a tech startup is the ability to program and the ability to sell.
Knowing how to code well will give you the design, sales, and marketing insights you want, while also honing an important skill that not only is valuable in and of itself, but will push your cognitive abilities in a positive direction while you're still young.
I don't see how coding precludes you from exploring starting a business now, either.
I was curious what GPT4 has to say:
It's great that you have a clear goal and have already gained some coding skills. The right approach for you ultimately depends on your interests, strengths, and how you envision your role in the tech company you want to start.
As the founder of a tech company, it's valuable to have a basic understanding of coding and technology, which you have already acquired. This knowledge will help you make informed decisions, communicate effectively with your technical team, and understand the development process.
Given your current situation, here are some suggestions to consider:
Focus on your strengths: If you feel more passionate about marketing, sales, design, or business strategy, consider focusing on these areas to build a strong foundation. You can always collaborate with technical experts to bring your ideas to life.
Evaluate your ideas: Analyze the business ideas you want to pursue and determine how critical it is to have deep technical expertise. If your ideas revolve around complex software or require extensive technical knowledge, you may want to continue learning to code.
Networking: Start attending tech meetups, hackathons, and networking events to meet like-minded individuals and potential technical cofounders. Building a strong network will be invaluable when you're ready to start your company.
Balance your skills: You can continue learning to code at a slower pace while also focusing on marketing, sales, and design. This way, you'll develop a more rounded skill set that would be beneficial in the long run.
Remember that there's no one-size-fits-all answer. Reflect on your interests, strengths, and goals to determine the path that suits you best. As a founder, having a mix of technical and non-technical skills can be advantageous, but it's essential to understand where your passion lies and focus on the areas that will bring the most value to your future company.
The number one reason most startups I have tried to help fail is simply because they don't sell. Technical founders are very often scared of picking up the phone, taking someone for drinks, and just busting their ass on the street. It's safer doing stuff they are good at - coding. I can't count the number of startups I have seen go down the drink because the founders wouldn't get off the computer and go and sell something.
I can tell you from personal experience how awesome it is when you get a business guy who works his ass off selling and handling contracts etc (I'm in b2b). Not only does it bring in many more sales, but it makes you more productive so you can concentrate on the task at hand - no context switching involved.
Now all someone has to do is solve the problem: how do you find competent business guys or programmers. Both are hard to come by, and are mysterious to the other group.
I think marketing skills are incredibly in demand in an early stage startup, even more so than technical skills!
Look at this recent HN post and what people would want to read about most:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2012959
If you're a nontechnical person joining a startup, don't bother learning to hack beyond a very basic understanding. You won't be any good at it for a while, and they probably already have smart technical founders who will tackle the difficult technical problems.
There are lots of brilliant hackers in the Bay Area. People who know marketing seem to be far more rare here, and as a result are highly sought after by the smart startups that have a real business model and understand they need marketing to succeed.
If you're actually good at copywriting and can drive serious traffic, you will have numerous startups literally BEGGING you to to take their money and run ad campaigns for them.
It's important to make a distinction here. If you come from a brand advertising background, then forget it, no startup will want to hire you.
If you know performance marketing, and can deliver conversions and predictable ROI, you can rapidly and easily get as many consulting clients(which lead to job offers, if you want) as you can possibly handle.
Go to startup meetups, mention that you know how to drive traffic and convert it, and before long you'll have a stampede of eager startup founders beating their way to your door.
If the non-tech founder can't even learn enough code to get anything built then I would be concerned for their level of dedication for their own idea.
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I think thats a little much.
Part of being a good business man is knowing where you weaknesses lie, and knowing how to plug those holes in your game. So why would you waste valuable time trying to pick up a skill that you're probably not interesting in having and will probably not put to use, when you can spend that time raising money to hire a developer or get one to come in with you and handle the development?
Everyone (even non-techies) should do a startup once. Probably when they are young.
You should have a lemonade stand. You should learn how to manage your time. You should find out if you have what it takes to build something from beginning to end. You should try and sell someone something.
This doesn't mean you need to lose $100k of your friends and family's money. It does mean you should go through the process of discovering if you can be a leader and build something from scratch. If it all falls flat, call me. I always prefer to hire people who know what they are good at, and what they aren't. I'll take the guy who failed at 2 startups and tells me he won't do a third over the person fresh out of college who thinks he can run my company better than me. So will every Manager I know at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
So I originally came from a sales background into tech because I wanted to start a company. I told myself: "I'll just hire devs to build out the things that I will want to sell, surely I can have someone else do the thing that I'm bad at for money"... and (surprise) It didn't work (Selling Websites).
The reason it didn't work was because I needed at least a fluency with technology to be able to instruct people on how to build my thing (or to use no/low code solutions to build my thing). The tech world is a full blown culture that you need to understand. There are many ways to get the fluency... but the easiest way is actually to learn how to do programming/ development. In the least do it on a basic level so you can understand how the world works.
You might get answers about "no code" or "low code" options out there... but they will fail you for the same reason... It requires a trained mind to utilize these solutions.
The cool part is that once you are into it and you have a handle it will become easier to answer this question you asked.
The way you 'succeed in business' is by creating value. Being closer to large changes in value (e.g., in sales) helps you individually make more money on average perhaps. And if making money is your idea of success in business, then that makes sense.
But creating value also involves not paying attention to what everyone else is doing. Imho, the difference between buy side and sell side is very crucial. You can say there are 'very few exceptions' -- but those exceptions are the beginnings of all new businesses since the idea of business began. The 'buy' in buy side is about taking risk, acquiring risk. It's true that the markets can't afford for everyone to do this. Otherwise we'd be in a topsy-turvy merry-go-round of a place.
But if you have something new and important to say or do: why would you want to be anywhere else?
> So, if anyone here doesn't really have a passion for technology, but just wants to make a lot of money in the startup industry: my recommendation is to go quit your job as a programmer right now, and get an entry-level sales job to help hone your people skills, because nothing will help get you there faster.
Agreed. And also if you do have a real passion for technology, and not just making a lot of money in the startup industry, I take your recommendation as keep on programming.
I think something that a lot of developers forget is that building a product is only half the battle, if that. You also need to sell it and make sure you're building something people actually want.
So theres a lot more to running a company than just building a product . You also need to sell it, support it, manage people and run the actual company. Just because you're a good developer doesn't mean you're a good entrepreneur. Sure you could learn along the way but you'll also be taking on more financial risk, be responsible for a lot more things and likely not have as steady of an income.
The reward may be much higher but so is the risk and responsibility. That doesn't mean you shouldn't set out on your own and learn to be an entrepreneur, it's just the reason why the financials line up the way they do.
It's also worth noting that there is a 3rd option. If you happen to get in on an early startup that is later successful and goes public or gets acquired, it can also be very financially rewarding for you. I remember reading somewhere that in the valley it is common to hear "he was an early employee at Google" which is well known to translate to "he's now very wealthy".
Turns out it takes more than being great at coding to build a startup. I'd to learn Marketing, Pitching, Emailing etc. skills in my journey which I never thought about before starting up whereas, I thought building a good product would cover that part.
This reminds me of my days teaching test prep classes for Kaplan. At some point in every Kaplan teachers career, there came a point when you'd do the math and realize that Kaplan was charging students $100/hour but only paying you $20. Inevitably a few of the best teachers would try to go out on their own. They soon realized that getting students took a lot of work - putting flyers up on campus, working your network looking for referrals, building a word of mouth reputation. Most ended up failing and coming back or moving on to something else. There were a few that made it big (e.g. Robin from TestMasters) and it turns out that these were not necessarily the best teachers, but they were definitely excellent marketers.
It’s more common than you think: Many smart marketers and business folks have great ideas for a product and a great plan for selling it, but no ability to build it.
If you are passionate about starting a SaaS company but don’t know programming, should that stop you from pursuing your venture?
Do you have any experience starting businesses? Building businesses takes a set of skills that can be learned and practiced.
Your argument could also be turned around to say that you can’t be a successful programmer if you’re the kind of person who goes out and says “I want to build an app”
If you have any capacity for those things though, they're far easier to learn and practice with. It takes years to become good at building products, but I've gone from almost no knowledge to being good enough to manage a product's marketing/advertising in just a few months. But I disagree, I think having technical skills is the most important part to starting a business. You can test as many things as you want before committing, you can build a project you're committed to for "free" (no cost out of pocket, just your time) until it's ready, etc. I don't want to understate the value of the non-technical roles, but I don't think you can overstate the value of being able to own the entire tech stack yourself.
I'm a coder who's built a lot of platforms for startups from the ground up. I have some scorn for people who are too good to learn the technical; when I hire a roofer, he's looking at me like I'm an idiot, so same goes. But. I always thought, hey, I've got the coding skill so why shouldn't I have it all - and be fabulously successful from some good idea I cobbled together with nothing but 1's and 0's in my free time? So, I built six or seven apps on my own recognizance, none of which took off, but which were all (I think) revolutionary concepts at the time, and each of which took a year or so to be fully functional platforms.
The other apps I built in the interim, to make money. These I built as a freelancer for people who were very competent in their particular businesses and were using web/mobile apps to basically streamline things and improve efficiency; I would reject anyone coming to me with a job like "I have this idea for an app..." because I have a dozen ideas for apps that are probably better than theirs, and I know how to actually build them, but what I emphatically have never had are a functioning existing business, business model, growth strategy or investment for those things. Ideas are just ideas. Even if you take years to develop the code skills to build them swiftly. In fact, if you do, it's even more painful to watch them vanish after a little while.
1's and 0's are just electrons on silicon, after all. We're writing in sand.
I've come to ...well, not exactly love or respect the fast-talking business guys, but... appreciate that maybe focusing on just how to build things (whether you code them or not) is really not the key. It's a necessary ingredient, for sure. But like I said, I've got a dozen good ideas for apps. Non-technical people have like hundreds of bad ideas for apps, and most of them want to catapult themselves to success with neither a good idea nor a functional business model nor existing investment -- they just want to entice someone like me to work for them on faith/credit, and it's always been this way, for 30 years now.
Sorry to rant. But what does work is when people have a successful business already, or the skills to set one up, which I don't have. When they have domain knowledge in their field, whether that's the food industry or hotels or manufacturing. Then, finding someone to build the software creatively or learning to do it yourself can add a whole layer of value, because you already understand the business logic inside and out.
There will be a few unicorn dream startups that exist only 1's and 0's, in the 2020s... and as sad as I am about how all those things turned out since the 1990s, I'm not totally closed to the possibility of being at the front of one. But that's not where the bulk of wealth will be created. It'll be in building usable software that acts as a multiplier for the capacity of ordinary businesses... and not necessarily in the "take a 2.5% cut" way.
I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.
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