[saturdayplace]

> This brings up a very unusual business model for aspiring entrepreneurs. Work in a domain that is technologically challenged until you understand it profoundly. Then start a business that advances that domain by empowering its actors.

I wonder... is collaborating with someone who 'profoundly' understands the domain a way to short-circuit this process?

[nkabbara]

It's definitely how most people do things today. The way I did it, like everything else, has its pros and cons.

Some of the pros:

1. My buddies in the dealership domain are my customers. They call me up and ask me for a feature directly.

From my experience, this yields better quality features than talking to the domain expert that's probably trying to translate his conversation with the customer.

2. There's the advantage of you being in a domain where most people are your friends then your potential users. A lot of psychological walls are broken this way (what is he trying to sell me?). We trust each other by our reputation in the industry and this tends to extend to they quality of software they expect from us. Them knowing that we're developing it ourselves helps a lot.

Imagine cold walking into a business like a salesman would and offering your product. Now imagine walking into the business where you know the owner very well and you intend of having coffee with him first, then telling him about how you might be able to help him out. Big difference.

There are more, but these come to mind now.

So it's not only quality of software, but also how much easier it is to get your first paid user base that will enable you to create a good product that would hopefully scale beyond your paid-users-as-friends.

[danielharan]

Muggles don't have a technically informed imagination.

If you've had a boss or consulting client asking for convoluted features (or more likely solving the wrong problem), you know what I'm talking about.

Can a supportive cofounder be better? If they listen to what you have to say. But there's another category of failure with a tech-biz duo: they won't know to ask for the really simple to implement but insanely lucrative features.

In my first tech job, I had a conversation with a person writing specs. He was explaining what he was going to put in for the next version.

-"Have you thought of Y?"

-"Maybe for the version after that, it would be really useful but I don't think we have time to do it before X"

-"Y is 10 times easier to implement than X"

-"Oh..."

Laziness and domain knowledge are a great combo. I'm sure several others here have had the same conversation.

Doing customer discovery recently a customer told me: "That would be the holy grail of retail". None of my likely competitors are showing any signs of tackling the same problem. Maybe my strategy is dead wrong. I'm betting my competitors are all techies with little in the way of domain knowledge.

[ryanhuff]

Why not? Nobody knows everything, and if this collaborator is a part of your founding team, that's a recipe for success.