I am a Female Sole Founder with no Dev Experience… Yeah, it’s a Tough Road

http://harperlindsey.com/2010/12/08/i-am-a-female-sole-founder-with-no-dev-experience%E2%80%A6-yeah-it%E2%80%99s-a-tough-road/

by static47 • 16 years ago

45 47 16 years ago

harperlindsey.com

dj_axl• 16 years ago

Please link to your startup (in this case, Swayable) at first mention in the first paragraph! Name is mentioned but not until the third paragraph is there a link to http://www.swayable.com.

wccrawford• 16 years ago

Why even bring the 'female' bit into it? It means nothing, unless you think it's a handicap... And then it is, but only because you think it is.

As for finding a co-founder... You expect to do that without giving up equity? What would be in it for them? I'm not surprised you haven't found anyone.

derefr• 16 years ago

Presumably because you'd probably skip right past the link if it was just titled "I am a Sole Founder with no Dev Experience… Yeah, it’s a Tough Road."

weavejester• 16 years ago

I actually found the "no dev experience" part to be the most interesting part.

Declaration3• 16 years ago

She's in marketing...

Interesting how so many of the comments are about whether or not "female" belongs in the post.

So now she's in marketing, and smart.

shubber• 16 years ago

I think that, frankly, it probably is a handicap whether she thinks it is or not. There are going to be folks who write off the female single founder where they wouldn't a male single founder. It's worth recognizing that there is a barrier, and the fact that we don't see it is the single biggest reason that it isn't going anywhere.

On the other hand, I agree with you that the dominating factor is the single non-technical founder problem. I'm unclear about how this really differentiates from wannabe clients who have a fabulous idea for a start up: "and will you please build the whole thing for 1% of net?"

Declaration3• 16 years ago

She's not promising her devs 1% of equity for building the whole thing. She's hiring a dev team to build her project, and paying them work-for-hire.

The net of the article is that there's a lot of challenges building a tech startup when you're not a dev...that's valid.

marquis• 16 years ago

Well, considering how much attention her post has generated that fact that she is a female well may be to her benefit. Her entire story could be valuable for her when pursuing funding, as it's fairly unique.

Mz4• 16 years ago

Her "day job" is "being a mom of twins and a wife". I doubt any man doing a startup can say something similar. She doesn't really talk much about how that impacts her work but there is substantial evidence that raising kids and running the household routinely interfere with female career ambitions but usually don't interfere with male career ambitions. So perhaps it is relevant (to her challenges with trying to do a startup), even if she hasn't made it clear why.

Just a thought.

citricsquid2• 16 years ago

but what does that have to do with her gender? That was her choice (Well I assume a decision between her and her partner?) and it happens with Men too.

grovulent2• 16 years ago

'"being a mom of twins and a wife. I doubt any man doing a startup can say something similar.'

A bit hard given that men by definition can't be mothers and wives...

Seriously though - there is certainly a sense where adding the 'female' into the description of the reality actually does get extra information across. The fact is that life balance is often more important to women and they do still tend to get lumped with the majority of the housey chores in a relationship. Plus women have a much smaller window of opportunity to 'have it all' with biological clocks exhausting very quickly.

I do wonder if women might be better suited to start-up life in their forties. a lot of women of middle age and beyond seem to have an eerie kind of clear-headedness about things - whereas men really start to go to seed and have mid-life crises and all that. That's precisely the sort of time where men benefit the most from engaging in strong family acttivities..

icey• 16 years ago

Maybe the article got changed, but the article I read says this:

my “day job” [...] is a co-owner of a marketing project management business

MaysonL• 16 years ago

Read the article:

"at the same time working my “day job” which is a co-owner of a marketing project management business."

In addition to the day job and the startup, she's a mother of twins and wife.

citricsquid2• 16 years ago

I read that as she's unwilling to give equity to "...someone I met at an event for 2 days..." not that she's unwilling to give any out. If she's unwilling to give any out then I agree.

bhoung• 16 years ago

Cheap shot... but I guess that means she's ruling out people that she would click with. Or she has already decided she doesn't want to work or click with anyone.

keiferski• 16 years ago

Maybe "mother" would have been a better term to use?

vinhboy• 16 years ago

Why are people on HN so anal about how people identify themselves? If I introduce myself as "single beer-loving founder", why is that even an issue? If I view myself and wishes to identify myself in a certain way why can't we just accept that? Besides, this is a personal blog, can't people say what they want on their own blog? The worst part is now there is a whole section of this thread dedicated to this pointless conversation.

araneae• 16 years ago

Because it's always female. Never beer-loving, or Asian, or bipolar. The whole industry is caught up in this obsession over the lack of women in tech, and I'm so incredibly sick of it.

patio11• 16 years ago

I think people have the perception at the Female part is being invoked to excuse the Non-Developer part.

Without specific reference to this post, have we ever read:

I'm a male developer, and I want to do a startup. I can handle all the coding - I'm such an underappreciated genius - but I need some of that stuff. You know, that marketing stuff. With the pretty words and stuff. I would do it myself, but it's just all I have all sorts of manly responsibilities. I mean, hello, wife and kids? Like I'd ever have time for marketing stuff. It can't be too hard, though.

I went to a networking party to find a marketing stuff person. All twenty something girls, pff, it figures. Well, they probably have time for learning that marketing stuff since they don't have anything more important to do. I talked to a couple of them, but it just didn't click. Besides, give away half my company to a marketer? Are you crazy?! It's just some words strung together in a particular order.

I hired a marketing stuff firm. I was always more cut out for asking for stuff than for doing stuff. It takes so long and their stuff doesn't look like the stuff I would write if I could write stuff! And every time their incompetence requires a redo, they charge more money!

It's no wonder there aren't more men doing stuff. I feel so unwelcome.

benmccann• 16 years ago

It's a fine way to identify one's self. But it's not a terribly relevant title. The article has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she is female.

hackinthebochs• 16 years ago

Her intro is listing her notable traits that are rather uncommon in the field of web entrepreneurship. Female being probably the biggest one. This is no different than any other 'hook' people use to gain attention. It's only worth noting the fact that she noted her gender because everyone is so sensitive about the subject.

Nox2• 16 years ago

Speaking as somebody with a Masters in digital anthropology and almost 5 years non-technical experience with startups, who is also a comp sci student now to round out my qualifications, gender does sometimes matter when it really shouldn't.

That said, I don't think focusing on it as a definitive characteristic is helpful at all. I bought codegoddess.com thinking I could make some awesome online hub for female coders, and then realized a chromosomal marker isn't a very good distinguishing feature.

da288• 16 years ago

I've seen quite a few similar concepts out there, but I think your functional but cool domain name is one that I would easily remember over the rest. I really don't get why startups go for some obscure fabricated name linked to some deep Latin or Greek ethos instead of a more functional engaging name.

il• 16 years ago

I would strongly urge you to reconsider your approach and get a technical cofounder. I've seen countless startups founded by nontechnical people outsourcing everything stumble because crucial technical and architecture decisions were made poorly in the beginning.

Outsourcing development seems almost orthogonal to the principles of building a startup-iterating fast, making do with limited resources, etc.

I've done consulting before for some startups that outsourced all development, and although they were run by brilliant business people, everything moved at an incredibly languid pace.Even something as simple as pasting analytics code into their site took several emails to their development team in India and hours of waiting.

And, although I don't know about this from experience, I would assume that lacking a technical founder will severely reduce your chances of getting funded.

static473• 16 years ago

I 1000% agree with you (this is the author of the article btw). I am constantly in search of a techincal co-founder and I will give equity to the right person, but that takes time. I feel outsourcing can get me to a place to keep the project going until I find the right person. In no way do I see outsourcing as the end all solution :) I have the upmost respect for developers and truly hope that I can find the right fit eventually for Swayable. Thanks for your insight!

potatolicious• 16 years ago

My fear for you is that the more you outsource to "get things going", the less likely a capable founder would want to hop on.

Unless you are paying an extreme premium (and you're beyond swimming in investor cash), odds are your system started as a technical nightmare, and is only becoming moreso by the day. As a dev I would be extremely hesitant of hopping on board anything with such a questionable technical past, especially if the product momentum is too high to make a total rework possible.

mcfunley• 16 years ago

That is impossible. No one can agree more than one hundred percent, which by definition is the most that anyone can agree.

sn• 16 years ago

Have you checked out women 2.0?

ladon86• 16 years ago

I had some fun rating things on Swayable. The total variety of different stuff makes it quite compelling.

Actually I think just the rating part alone would make quite a fun iPhone app (i.e. make that the focus of the app, as only ~5% of users will actually be creating Swayables). It's a fun game. However, your list of Swayables doesn't seem to be randomized at present - please have that fixed as it's always the same choices every time I visit the site.

static473• 16 years ago

Great tip! I am actually in phase 2 development now and updating that exact feature ;) making it more random and being able to sort by category. The iPhone app launches next month, along with a new site design :) Thanks for checking out the site and for your feedback!

tibbon• 16 years ago

I added in a comment on her site as well that she might want to look into making some more of those images on the page actual text for some SEO boost on the page. As it is right now, there is almost no 'text' on the page.

As google sees it: http://bit.ly/gZ2inI

rksprst2• 16 years ago

A few comments regarding the product.

- What if I am deciding between more than 2 things? I might have 3 watches I'm choosing between.

- I don't want random strangers to vote on this, I want people I trust. What about private swayables?

- Not everything has a picture. I'm deciding between a vacation to Africa or China, do I need to go looking for pictures to use the product?

- The use cases that make using this product "natural and easy" are very few. Sure, there are a ton of ways you could use this, but then it doesn't become easy anymore for most of the use cases I can think of - it's easier to just google the info or ask a friend. Do you really expect people to use this to decide which movie to see? Or what restaurant to go to?

- The captcha you use to register is insane. I don't even want to give you my full name to register, why would I watch a 15-30 second video clip to find the captcha text. I quit at this step. (Also, I assume you're getting some money from those captcha video ads - makes the product seem "cheaper".)

- Some decisions are time-sensitive, how do you handle those decisions? Time-sensitive swayables would need to be more likely to appear than regular swayables. Can you guarantee I'll get X number of responses within Y minutes? It's going to be a chicken-and-egg type problem in getting people to use it for use cases like "where to go for dinner".

- Also, I'd suggest making the swayable viewer ajax and pre-loading the next few items. If I click next, I don't want to wait a few seconds for the page to load, I just want the next item.

Good luck! It's an interesting idea.

static473• 16 years ago

Fabulous feedback rksprst, thank you! Couple of comments on your feedback:

- Currently you can only compare 2 items. (love the idea of more though)

- You can set your Swayables as private so they don't go for public voting, so you can send it to just 1 person or share on your social networks.

- Regarding items that don't have pictures - You can use any website or search any term to find an image, it's all automated, so if you do want to create a Swayable for "Africa or China" just enter those terms into our search box for Africa, then the other item for china and we'll show you image results.

- Agree with the natural and easy, working through a new revision now to make this more intuitive and better looking. The iPhone app is coming soon as well, so you can create Swayables on the go.

- Captcha, thanks for the feedback on this one.

- Thank you for the ajax tip as well.

Totally appreciate you taking the time to provide such constructive feedback, and for checking out the site...

- Lindsey

rksprst2• 16 years ago

Also, wanted to mention that I think your main issue is going to be the behavioral change that your site requires. Users aren't used to making decisions by using a Swayable.

With new users that you acquire, the product might be awesome at first but once the novelty wears off, the users usually go back to making the choices in whatever way they were before.

Others might would not be interested because while this does solve a problem of deciding between two items, people have already established processes in making those decisions (be that asking their significant other, looking at product reviews online, or asking friends). Using a Swayable doesn't make the decision making process so unbelievably simpler to make a user take the effort to change the way in which they make decisions. As a rule-of-thumb, products that require a large behavioral change (and I think this is one of them) need to provide a 10X improvement for the user in order for them to consider making a change.

I'm sure you've probably thought about these issues, would be interesting to see how you address them and how consumers respond. Although this might just be "fun" enough that makes them use it.

BTW, there's a great paper on this topic: http://hbr.org/product/why-consumers-don-t-buy-the-psycholog...

HilbertSpace2• 16 years ago

Part I

Mostly you don't need and don't want a 'technical co-founder'.

Also, the concept of 'a developer' without being a lot more specific makes little sense.

Here's the situation:

(A) You can go to college and study stuff and learn, say, (1) getting good at reading for comprehension and writing clearly, (2) the precision, discipline, and tools in pure math, (3) some topics in 'computer science', and (4) thinking 'critically', that is, accurately putting candidate ideas into the correct one of the three buckets True, False, and Not Clear Yet.

(B) You can learn how to do the programming you need for your project.

(A) can help with both (B) and your project, but it's likely quite possible to do both (B) and your project without (A).

For (B), what you need to know about 'development' is what you need for your project.

Here is a fact of life in Computer-World: The world is like a hardware store the size of Texas and packed floor to ceiling with tools. There are LOT of tools. Each tool takes time and effort to learn to use; the main problem is that the tool builders are just awful at describing their work; if you have the usual advantage in verbal skills over male computer nerds, then the documentation may cause you to yell and scream in outrage and agony.

The best technical writer is God, usually better than the pure mathematician P. Halmos. Way down on Earth is D. Knuth. All the rest in computing are in the infernal reaches.

But, for anything very complicated you might need to do, there is likely a good tool for it, and it will nearly always be easier to learn to use the tool than to do without or build your own.

So, most of what you need to do to be the 'developer' you need is just to learn to use some good versions of the tools you need.

Yes, now largely the software you need to write is just a little 'glue' joining together the 'blocks' that are the tools you use.

Can a 'developer' learn all the tools in that big collection the size of Texas? Not a chance! Heck, even being a 'librarian' just cataloging the tools would be more than a full-time job.

Further, the collection of tools keeps growing, quickly.

So, here's a deep, dark secret ALL, REAL MALE HACKER nerds keep to themselves (and never but NEVER tell women!): At the start of each new project, it is necessary to learn at least some new tools.

So, really, NO developer is ready to 'develop' without learning some new tools.

So, one of the main differences between you and any 'developer' is that you just have more tools to learn.

Next, you will need some basics: So, you will need a PC, at least reasonably current. I built mine from parts five years ago, and it's still fine.

You need to get good enough to send and receive e-mail and to use a Web browser. Since you are already posting on Hacker News, apparently you've got this part done.

If you don't know Computer Parts 101, then have someone give you a 30 minute lecture. The final exam will be to go to Tom's Hardware Page and Tiger Direct and explain what you are seeing.

For a Web site business (common now), you need to know Internet and Web 101. Again have someone give you a 30 minute lecture.

Next you need to get started writing software.

Here you should pick between the world of Linux and the world of Windows. While Linux is likely more popular on HN, I recommend Windows if only because there is a company behind it with some tens of thousands of programmers, is a CEO who commonly yells and screams, is a COB who remains one of the sharpest tacks in the box, is about $40 billion in cash in the bank, are some very serious enterprise customers that mostly are pleased, is a LOT of free software (really, after you buy a copy of Windows, darned near all the rest of their software is available for free in 'Express' editions -- yes, where you spend your time and effort learning their software so that you can use it in production and then pay the big bucks), they work HARD on documentation (they should work much harder), and there are so many people programming Windows that for nearly any problem you encounter many others have been there before you, and a Google search can turn up a forum with answers.

One of the best things in computing is Microsoft's .NET Framework. So it is a collection of relatively low level software tools, maybe the size of half of Texas, to do nearly anything more than two people have ever needed to do. .NET is enormous.

Next, heavily your 'development' is to exploit .NET, and for that you have mostly just two good alternatives, use the language C# or use (the more recent version of) the language Visual Basic. I strongly prefer Visual Basic because it is much easier to read on the page and lets you do very nearly as much as C#.

For C and C++ -- f'get about them on Windows now.

Part of .NET is ASP.NET where ASP abbreviates 'active server pages'. They aren't very 'active'. Really ASP.NET is just a way to write software where you mostly don't have to work much with lower level things like HTML and JaveScript. For nearly anything standard in Web site development, ASP.NET has tools to make the work easy. E.g., for a lot of what is needed, it's necessary to write JavaScript code, but ASP.NET does that for you. Nice. You may be able to make a lot of use of JavaScript without ever seeing it.

There is also ADO.NET where ADO abbreviates 'active data objects'. They can be somewhat 'active', but I mostly avoid depending on that. ADO.NET is how in a program you manipulate the database system SQL Server or one of its competitors, Oracle, DB2, etc.

SQL abbreviates 'Structured Query Language' which is closely associated with database.

What is 'database'? Since the work on 'relational database' at IBM and U. Berkeley in the 1970s, mostly we store important data in a relational database. Microsoft's version is SQL Server. A database remains conceptually like some stacks of paper forms say, from the IRS.

So a 'database' consists of some 'tables'. Each 'table' consists of rows and columns. In one table, all the data is for just one IRS form, say, Form 1040.

Each row is like one copy of an IRS form, that is, has the data from just one copy of the form. Each column is like one of the 'fields' on the IRS form for that table.

You can designate a column as a 'key' which is like an 'index' which means that, given a value of the key, the software can read the row with that key value quickly. In the case of IRS Form 1040, one column may be SSN; you may designate it as a key; and then you can regard the database as a stack of Form 1040 copies sorted in order on SSN. Simple enough.

A table can have at most one 'clustered key' in which case the rows are stored on disk in essentially key order, and that can make some operations faster.

Whatever you may do with relational database for a Web site, if your business gets significant, then almost certainly you will store all your routine business records in relational database.

The main idea in database 'design' is for the keys and the other columns to be in 'third normal form' which means that each row is conceptually, in the problem being solved, 'a function of the key, the whole key, and nothing but the key' -- think about this a little and you will see why.

Part of the glory of relational database is 'transactions'. The key here is the 'log file': For each 'transaction', which is just some sequence of database operations that you say are all part of some one 'transaction', the operations are written 'provisionally' to the log file and to the database itself. At the end of the work of your transaction, there is one more 'atomic' write to the log file saying that the transaction is done -- 'committed'.

So if the computer goes down, when it comes back up the data base software first reads the log file and 'undoes', 'rolls back', all the transactions that were in progress but not 'committed',

The classic example is moving money from checking to savings: If the bank's computer quits, then once the computer is running again, the money has either been moved or has not been; there is no case of the money being lost 'during moving'.

Another part of transactions is 'integrity': So there can be many programs running at the same time manipulating the same database.

E.g., while you are moving money from savings to checking, the bank can be updating your checking account, and nothing gets confused. To make this work, relational database has to work with 'locks' and 'deadlock' detection and resolution.

The simple case is two programs, A and B, that both need to manipulate data X and Y in some careful way. So, program A gets a 'lock' on data X; program B gets a lock on data Y; program A then waits until it can get a lock on data Y; program B waits until it can get a lock on data X; and now programs A and B are in a 'deadlock' since neither can complete and will wait forever.

Relational database detects such deadlocks and resolves them. E.g., program A may have its work on data X 'rolled back' and its lock released; program B is allowed to run and finish, and then the work of program A is just restarted.

Nice.

In particular, yes, it is standard to backup a relational database while it is running.

Mostly manipulations of relational database are done with the language 'transact SQL' (T-SQL). So, even if you are using ADO.NET, what goes to SQL Server is T-SQL. You can run T-SQL statements just by typing them into a file and giving it to the SQL Server program sqlcmd.exe -- I like doing that.

For SQL Server, there is a level lower (closer to SQL Server) called 'Server Management Objects' (SMO) you can use in, say, Visual Basic.

You now know Database 101.

HilbertSpace2• 16 years ago

Part II

Yes, since we mentioned that database and printed forms are close, sure, database and forms on a screen, from either Windows or a Web page, are also close, and there is software to make routine 'forms' applications easy.

All things considered, as serious programming languages go, Visual Basic (now) is close to the top of the list both in what it can do and how easy it is to do it. Its 'managed memory' is nicely advanced and a real help for programmers; there's hardly a programmer on the planet both smart and careful enough to write significant on-line software without the help of 'managed memory' and not make at least some fairly serious errors.

What do you type into? Mostly the norms are to type your software into an 'integrated development environment' (IDE), and on Windows that would likely be Visual Studio (VS). For the Microsoft relational data base software SQL Server, are supposed to type into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

I minimize SSMS and flatly refuse to use VS. Instead I just picked a good text editor (KEdit) with a lot of power (including an elegant macro language to automate things) and use it to type this post, TeX for mathematical word processing, e-mail, Visual Basic code, SQL Server 'scripts' in the language T-SQL, Web pages (using ASP.NET), and more.

Then I also have a 'scripting' language, ObjectRexx, also elegant. Likely now a better alternative would be Power Shell.

Then get a copy of

Jim Buyens, 'Web Database Development, Step by Step: .NET Edition', ISBN 0-7356-1637-X, Microsoft Press, Redmond, Washington, 2002.

It is some of the best technical writing on computing ever typed in.

That book will very much get you going.

For more, just look at the other books in the Microsoft series, read the on-line Microsoft documentation, and find more via Google.

No source of information on current programming is without flaws: For each topic, it is usually good to have more than one source. If from one source something is just not clear, then don't blame yourself and, instead, try other sources.

In the code you write, here's the most important consideration: Put in a lot of comments explaining what you are doing, and also put in references to the documentation on the details. Write your documentation clearly enough that anyone else could read your software and understand it, and that includes you six months from now. Otherwise, when you write your code, only God and you will understand it, and six months later, only God. This is why if you ask a 'developer' to modify a program written by someone else, the developer may just start over.

For 'quality', put the software aside until you forget the details, and then 'proof read' it as if some person you hate wrote it and you will get $1000 and bragging rights for each error you find.

Another point is, at any point in your code, when you receive data, CHECK it for reasonableness. So if you are writing some code to scan a list of users and find those in Maryland, make sure the code works even if the list has only 1 entry, no entries, no one in Maryland, and everyone in Maryland; this is called testing 'edge' cases. The easiest place to find subtle errors is in the edge cases. The easiest way to check correctness in edge cases is just to read the code carefully, VERY carefully, one edge case at a time.

In particular, if your Web site takes in data from a user, write code so that just absolutely, positively nothing at all can ever go wrong with your code no matter WHAT bits or bytes come in from the user -- no matter WHAT.

If you hire anyone, then they will have to do maybe 30% as much as you will in learning. Or, they learned HTML and then had to learn CSS, then ADO.NET, then Ajax, then Flash, then HTML5, and now four different smart phones. NO ONE knows all such stuff and, instead, just has to learn. The main difference for you is just that initially you have to learn more.

If you don't have (A) above, especially for computer science, then will this be important? Likely not: Occasionally you may do something inefficiently. For questions, post on fora, including HN. Again, mostly you will just be writing glue, not blocks that the glue joins.

I am a Female Sole Founder with no Dev Experience… Yeah, it’s a Tough Road

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