9 Things I Learned While Starting My Own Company and Keeping My Day Job

This short post is part of a nine part series: 9 Things I Learned While Starting My Own Company and Keeping My Day Job.

So you want to start your own company, huh? That’s awesome! Over the next few weeks I’m sharing a few lessons I learned when I set out to start my own company while still logging my 9–5 hours at my current gig.

Lesson 7: You’re not going to know how to do everything

And you need to figure out if that’s OK or not.

Take this example: say you want to build a web product but you’re not a developer. What do you do?

“Learn to code!” is the common response, and that’s probably the right approach, but, you have to consider what skills you have, and what you’re going to be excited to work on. There’s a conception of a “startup dream team” (occasionally referred to as “a Hacker, Hustler, and Hipster”, which actually means “An Engineer, a Marketer, and a Designer.”) It probably makes it easier if you show up as one of those three. But it kills me to watch an amazingly talented Engineer try to be a Salesperson, when they could instead follow the product marketing path and leverage their ability to write code.

Ultimately, you’re responsible for acquiring the skills needed to run your company as you are building it. Why? Because more than likely, you can’t yet afford anyone else to do it. Option B is to find a co-founders to fill in your weaknesses, but as with any relationship you better make sure you know and trust this person. With any early stage partnership it’s the common case one of the team members will get tired of the project, or not share the same vision and passion as the others.

In this case, I really recommend sitting down, and learning the skills necessary to run your business. Will you become an expert and everything from marketing to legal? No, probably not. But you need to get far enough that you can get real feedback from customers — until then you’re just goofing around.