An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

http://benogle.com/2013/03/25/an-idea-for-non-technical-founders-service-first-business.html

by mrbogle • 13 years ago

222 44 13 years ago

jenntoda• 13 years ago

Good points. With the abundance of services like Wufoo forms, Shopify, Weebly, and other "make your stuff without code" products out there, it is easier now than ever before to pull together a MVP, even if it means to take care of things behind the scenes manually. See how nastygal.com made it big with a humble start from an ebay store. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/technology/nasty-gal-an-on...

jonathanjaeger• 13 years ago

An in-depth interview with PandoMonthly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y04gnM57Sow

mrbogle• 13 years ago

Nasty gal is such an amazing story, and definitely a great example.

zevyoura• 13 years ago

>In practice, when I was attending meetups, I did not meet a single non-technical person who had done any of this leg work. I would have taken them and their idea very seriously if they had.

This is why I've stopped attending meetups that aren't specifically targeted towards devs. It's a shame, because there are many interesting people at those events, but every time I go to one I get sick of explaining why I don't want to work for startup X or be represented by recruiter Y.

pytrin• 13 years ago

This is a good approach for non technical people, no doubt. That is if it really suites their skillset.

As a non-technical founder, you are likely good at building and maintaining relationships. You are probably good at selling things. You might be great at framing, so people buy into your vision or get excited about your ideas. These are amazing, difficult-to-acquire skills.

Unfortunately, too many non-technical founders do not have those skills. Many people believe that an idea and "hustle" (working hard, being persistent) is enough. Now they just need to find people to build it, people to market it, people to sell it. They have this great idea! the rest will just fall into place.

The OP saw teams that made it through the YC process. Likely, those are not your average non-technical founders. If you do have those skills, then for sure - this is great advice.

mesozoic• 13 years ago

If they are non technical and don't have the hustle and flow skills then what exactly would they be bringing to a startup generally?

Assuming of course it's not money cause money solves most problems.

josephlord2• 13 years ago

Potentially domain knowledge, contacts, access, name...

Whether they are what is required will depend on the situation.

nness• 13 years ago

Whole range of advisory, strategic or research roles perhaps. Roles like these don't necessary require strong soft-skills or sales\marketing chops.

redschell• 13 years ago

I'm really not a big fan of the technical/nontechnical distinction. Here's a better idea: Be a useful co-founder. In your example, it would appear that our subject is not skilled, so the first thing they need to do is develop an edge that will allow them to be of use to a company.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/08/thoughts-from-a-former-busi...

I don't usually come across helpful posts on TC, but this one caught my eye. Basically, if you look like the stereotypical idea guy/gal, you need to put the startup dreams aside for a bit, work at an established company, gain some experience, and, here it comes, develop skills.

Now, I'd argue this guy (the TC guy) is spreading himself a bit too thin, but the idea of being the utility player on the team is pretty good. When combined with your work experience, you might be an attractive candidate. Go a step beyond that by following OP's advice and, you know, actually build something.

It doesn't need to be a home run, but it should speak for itself, and when you have something, anything really, that speaks for itself, you're in pretty good shape.

dsugarman2• 13 years ago

You don't generally have the luxury of having people to build it, people to market it and people to sell it. The fact is, you as a founder need to build something from nothing. The OP does a great job of explaining what that means for a non-technical founder.

your average non-technical founder is extremely likely to fail. If you want to give advice to the them, it should start: become exceptional.

fomojola• 13 years ago

Minor nitpick: the average founder is extremely likely to fail, technical or otherwise. Being a technical founder doesn't really dramatically increase the odds of success. As someone who suffers from "build it and they will come" syndrome, the article is actually decent advice for ANY founder, not just founders who aren't "technical".

pault• 13 years ago

I think this is excellent advice for developers too. We often get caught up tinkering with code because we enjoy it, when we should really be looking for an off-the-shelf or non-technical solution. If you can validate your ideas with nothing but google forms and manual email, all the better.

mooreds2• 13 years ago

Definitely. All too often, I'm into building what can be bought (often bought for $0). I'm a developer because building stuff is fun, but it isn't always the right choice for the business.

mooreds2• 13 years ago

As a tech person involved in a small company (not a startup), I can vouch for this reality, because I see it every day. The tech I bring to the table is very helpful, but the service side of the business is core.

There are tons (tons!) of businesses out there that can be made to scale, optimized or otherwise improved through technology, but can be proven out with nothing more than a wordpress blog (or other free, non-custom infrastructure).

entangld• 13 years ago

Good advice. Wish it was a little less condescending. I'm a marketing type who can code (more) now.

There is a vast amount of knowledge one needs to learn just to be a beginner. I don't blame so many idea people for trying to find shortcuts.

lukethomas• 13 years ago

Loved this article - non-technical people should learn how to SELL. There's no point in building something unless you have money in your hand first.

edanm• 13 years ago

This is GREAT advice. And not just for non-technical co-founders - this is how I would start almost any business, if I didn't already have money in the bank and my goal was to have a close-to-sure economic success. (Btw, Technical founders I would urge towards starting with a consulting practice as a way of getting a) money and b) business experience.)

Another benefit that isn't mentioned in the article: this gets you money in the bank from day 1, making you a lot less reliant on giving away equity to VC's, with all the good that implies. And honestly, if all you need is a technical person to help you scale after you've already got some money in the bank, you can always pay someone to do it - saving you even more equity.

OnyeaboAduba• 13 years ago

As a non technical founder I liked the article. Many of the ideas in the article are similar to things discussed in the book The Lean Startup by Eric Reiss . I think PG is a big fan of the way of thinking as well so the fact that the article was written by a YC alum isnt surprising.

helen842000• 13 years ago

This post made me really happy. THIS is the kind of encouragement that 'non-technical' aspiring founders need. Less of the "if you can't code you don't have valuable skills" attitude. I have a blog post sitting in draft form that has scarily similar advice to this based on my own experiences, however this describes it with some really inspiring YC examples.

I started working this way at the start of 2012 and all of my projects since then have been far more popular/successful and more pleasing to work on. This is because I'm fully in control of project progress, I can see things through to launch, pushing the limits of my coding skills and bringing my 'concierge' MVP to life.

For those looking for technical help with a project longer term, don't forget that by starting this way you're stripping back and leaving pure technical issues which allows those with technical skills to clearly see where they could bring value which makes offering help very interesting.

amarghose• 13 years ago

More importantly most non-technical founders (my past self included) have a habit of bringing very little to the table. With this kind of approach there's a clear value that both the technical and non-technical people are contributing.

spencerfry• 13 years ago

The premise of do what you're good at is great. However, even the non-technical examples listed still require quite a bit of technical knowledge (accounts, management, payment flows, notifications, etc.). The good thing is that these are fairly simple processes nowadays and can be picked up within a few months of studying.

mgkimsal• 13 years ago

"I did not meet a single non-technical person who had done any of this leg work. I would have taken them and their idea very seriously if they had".

In the last year I've met more than a dozen such groups. Of those, 2 had actually done some legwork on their own - one had attended a tradeshow showing nothing more than a powerpoint and had collected some leads. (initially, that was impressive). Another had done a lot of exploratory work, and when I asked them to do XYZ, they actually did it and gave me the results from it.

In both cases, I've extended a bit more of my time to work with these people in hopes of getting the project to a point where we might work together long term. In one case, we simply parted ways because the vision was shifting a lot on his end - no focus. In the other case, that team has actually called it quits - they had simply underestimated the time and effort involved in making it work, and I appreciated the halt vs dragging it on for months on end.

But rarely do I meet groups or people that have done any significant legwork at all - they're the typical "idea man/woman", and just need someone to "make it work".

drsim2• 13 years ago

Absolutely spot on. I would even extend this to developers. Why take a week to build a way to automate something that takes a human half a day when you don't know if anyone is ever going to pay for it?

I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder. He made all the deliveries himself to start with rather than building a grandiose delivery platform or hiring.

I started my B2B company the same way. Initially I copied and pasted my code into customers sites. My 'ordering system' was just a PayPal express checkout. Zero backend. Man was it dull. But as a developer I knew I could automate 90% of what I needed to, when I needed to.

Now it's completely automated apart from support. Meaning my notional margin (cost of sale being my previous contracting rate) is at 85%. And I know I've just written the code I needed to so as to not do the mundane manual tasks anymore.

sigil• 13 years ago

> I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder.

Could it have been Manuel Rosso of Food on the Table? He was the "Concierge MVP" example from Ries's book. They started by meal planning for a single family. If I'm remembering this right, he and his chef co-founder walked the grocery stores each week looking for the best food values, then drew up the week's menu...for that one family.

http://www.foodonthetable.com/

It worked, and they automated things as they scaled.

> I started my B2B company the same way... Now it's completely automated apart from support.

It's great to hear this. A film industry friend and I started a company last year with a very similar approach, but we're earlier along than you are. So far so good!

drsim2• 13 years ago

Ah, it could well be the Food on the Table guy.

All the best for your company!

bsimpson• 13 years ago

I studied entrepreneurship at USC, and this was one of the big lessons. It's a whole school about startups from a non-Silicon Valley POV, and the point they drill home more than any is to get out and validate your concept in the market as early as possible. Talk to people in your target audience before investing in building a product. Every class in the program requires interviewing 25/50/100/etc. "strangers" in your target audience.

In fact, USC's online graduate program for education started this way. They were trying to decide whether to do it or not, so they put up a landing page with a broken buy button and bought AdSense against it. When they realized how many people were trying to buy, they decided it was a market worth satisfying and built the program behind it.

TimPC2• 13 years ago

I mostly agree. I just want to specifically say for the games example that as a technical person, I'm willing to work with someone who will prove the game in the real world as a pen and paper game that can be much easier as an online game. Admittedly graphics heavy, programming intensive games I'm less interested in working with a game-designer as a co-founder but for something that's mostly a single screen app it's interesting.

TimPC2• 13 years ago

And no, I'm not available, I'm quite happy where I am, I'm just saying there are plenty of good real world independently designed board games that could be turned into better online games.

swombat• 13 years ago

> I graduated from YCombinator a few months ago ( S12 Easel ).

Anyone else bothered by this view of YCombinator as a kind of university programme?

I may be wrong, I have only met a few YC founders and they all seemed like nice, smart people, but it seems a bit off-colour to treat the mere fact that you've been through the YC programme as some kind of "graduation".

Maybe I'm just being grumpy or something... It's certainly not a big deal... but something just rubs me wrong when I read that sentence...

krschultz• 13 years ago

I think it's meant to be a training program that you graduate. Military guys will tell you when they graduated A-school or what ever is applicable. Welders graduate from vocational school. "Graduation" is applicable for any training program, not just university.

bigsomar• 13 years ago

This is great advise. You have an idea, tell it to technical person (you do not learn to code, lazy), make the idea a 'technical' challenge (focus on wrong thing) and get stuck in 'technology creates a market'. Create a marketplace and use technology to scale it.

knwang• 13 years ago

I would say this is not only for non-technical co-founders, but even for people with technical skills, starting with service, but the type of service whose value is not measured by hours. Then just come up with the engineering to automate said service. This approach has several advantages:

1. You will be working with real, money paying customers from day 1 - right there you are ahead of 90% of startup projects.

2. You get to work your customers to understand their pain points, needs directly, without annoying them - they will actually be delighted that you are trying to understand them better!

3. You have revenue coming from day 1.

4. When you launch your product, you already have a group of people in your target audience, with whom you hopefully have already eared trust.

aganek• 13 years ago

Fantastic approach. Great post.

My takeaways: (1) Look for unconventional ways to create a MVP (2) Hustle is a very valuable asset to a startup. For startups with high hustle-to-technical ratios, they may consider building a culture around hustle rather than code.

namenotrequired• 13 years ago

I think you hit the nail on the head. Very helpful article - I have passed it on to my less technical co-founder as an idea for our approach. Thank you.

hacker_beta• 13 years ago

Well written article and as a non-tech founder with experience starting a business, you nailed it. I started a company that I didn't know anything about prior to starting and if it wasn't for a lot a lot a lot of hustle I'd be in a much different place then I am today. It's great to have my own office, employees, and take care of personal finances from the revenues my business generates. The reward is great. But the hustle never stops. Actually that's the most exciting part of the business. Is waking everyday with a mission and being solely responsible for the success.

hef19898• 13 years ago

Seriously, this is one of the best pieces of advice regarding the founding of new businesses i read in along time. And very encouraging, too. Especially for non-tech guys like me!

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

Even the search engine, cited as an example of something that must be implemented to be useful, is something that was once done manually.

In the movie, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Spencer Tracy's character calls his secretary and asks her to check out his prospective son-in-law. Today, we would just ask Siri to do it.

timedoctor• 13 years ago

I'm a non technical co-founder and am building a combination of a serviced based business and technology business.

I think this article is spot on for most people. A lot of very successful businesses can be started with a wordpress blog and very little technical capability.

A business based around the technology itself is a highly risky venture. I would argue it's a lot lower risk to first develop a business without much technology, build up your customer base and then gradually build technology to automate more aspects of the business as you go.

PayCycle purchased by Intuit for $170million is an example of this. They started doing the payroll for businesses completely manually. Literally writing out checks etc. Then they gradually automated each step of the business.

For most businesses it's a better strategy to build the business first get customers and then build the technology second. Technology startups where you build the technology first are the exception not the rule.

An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

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