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As a non-developer solo founder, this article resonates with me more to the point of "as a founder, you can't expect to devote all your energies to any one thing". My responsibilities with my startup have varied pretty much by month. First it was working with potential customers to figure out what kind of product they wanted. Then it was time to find the technologies that would allow me to create that product. Then it was finding a technical staff that could build our product using those technologies. Then it was preparing our sales strategy, materials, and sales staff to sell the product. Now it's primarily marketing, pitching to writers, blogs, and doing what I can to get the word out to consumers. If I had to forecast the next month or two, I'd say that preparing investor pitches and materials will start to absorb an increasing amount of my time, and I will probably end up finding a marketer to take over my marketing responsibilities so I can focus on the funding side. Each of those stages basically involved devoting myself overwhelmingly to that particular issue that was most crucial to the business at that time (product development, sales, marketing, etc) then finding someone to delegate that work to once I needed to move on to the next step. Frankly, I'd never want to do it any other way, because it means I know every aspect of my business, my product, and my customers, and I know exactly what I need to delegate to make sure things get done right. Moreover, by knowing every aspect of my business, no one is indispensable to me. When my original programmer decided he had to take a full time/weekly paycheck job for financial reasons, I knew my product and technologies well enough that I was able to seamlessly bring in a replacement to finish the work because even though it wasn't my code, it was my product so I could specify exactly what had to be finished, and what he'd be working on after it was done. Last point, because it seems to be a widespread misconception here: Programming is only a part of the technical side. My startup uses multiple pieces of technology that my programmers weren't aware existed until I showed the APIs to them. Now, I couldn't have used those technologies without those programmers, because I lack the ability to actually take the APIs and plug them into our code, but I can find the technology that does what I need done, and then have them integrate it. If on the other hand I'd brought one of those developers on as a "technical co-founder", and relied on them to handle the technical side, we would have been dead in the water or would have ended up with an inferior product. None of this is intended to be antagonistic, or to diminish the importance of programming to a tech startup. I simply state it to show there is more than one way to bake a pie, and that a non-programmer can still handle all the technical aspects of a company needed to create a successful startup. Food for thought! |