Thinking about starting a startup but don’t know how to code? Here are the answers to the most common questions.
I’m the co-founder of a startup called Elucify with two of my good friends. We were most recently part of the Y Combinator W16 batch and are based in San Francisco.
In the process of building this company and our product, the past 6 months have been a huge learning experience, especially coming from a non-technical background.
I’ve always thought there is a dearth of content available in the startup community for non-technical folks, and thus I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned throughout this process. Non-technical co-founders are somewhat of a rarer breed: it’s almost always easier to start a startup when you’ve got some engineering/technical skills. However, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Below are some answers to the most common questions I’ve received from folks in business roles who are exploring starting their own startup.
1.“I have a great idea and all I need is for you to code it! How do I get them onboard?” Answer: Validate your idea with real customers/users
One of the biggest misconceptions that people in business roles have is that they can come up with an idea and an engineer will just “code it” for them. I can definitely recall tons of conversations with business folks where they talked about their ideas and asked me if I knew any good engineers that would work on their idea.
Here’s the harsh truth: this almost never works to recruit an engineer. Why would they choose to work for free for you when they can get $120–130k working at Google? Suddenly, your “cool” idea doesn’t seem so cool anymore.
So how do you try to get an engineer on-board to help you out? There’s no easy answer to this, but getting some validation on your idea and pitching that to someone is a lot more compelling than coming up with some cool idea in your head.
“I’ve got this idea and I’ve gotten 10 companies to sign LOI’s (letters of intent) that they will pay $40,000 each annually for this software if this is built. Are you interested?” sounds more compelling than “I’ve got a really really cool idea and I need you to code it. You interested?”
Doing the legwork on validating your idea and getting feedback on it before it is even built goes a long way into trying to get someone technical to join you on your startup journey.
When we were in the early stages of building Elucify, the way I motivated my co-founders to build product was talking to potential users (before the product was even built!) to figure out whether there was a market for our product. If you can prove that thousands and thousands of people want your idea/product if it’s built, it’s definitely more of an interesting sell.
2. What do I do if I don’t know how to code? Answer: Always be in “learning mode” and never fake it.
This is probably one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned. As much as you may pride yourself with coming up with technical answers on the spot with customers (which I did all the time in my past sales job), you never want to assume that you know about engineering when you really don’t (especially in a place like Silicon Valley!).
Instead, you’ll always want to be in learning mode. Ask questions, be honest about your intelligence, and learn. That’ll gain the respect of engineers far more than trying to “fake” it. One of the biggest things a startup will teach you is to be honest with yourself about what you know; “faking” it has limited returns. The amount of things that I have learned about the engineering process in the past 6 months by being humble and asking questions has been incredible.
3. What is my responsibility as a non-technical co-founder? Answer: Everything that isn’t engineering is your responsibility.
A lot of people ask me: “So, what do you actually DO?”. It’s true, if you’re a non-technical co-founder, you’ll find a lot of people confused about what I actually do on a day to day basis.
There’s enough material on this to merit a blog post of it’s own (which I’ll definitely write later), but the short answer is: literally everything but engineering.
And I mean everything. Your team needs to hit a sales number? That’s on you. Lunch needs to be delivered to the office? That’s on you too. The office is a complete mess and someone needs to clean it up? I hope you get where I’m going with this….
These are some truncated thoughts, and we’ll be posting more content to this blog throughout our startup journey. Stay tuned :)
Company update: We’re about to have some exciting product news soon, so stay tuned for that. In B2B sales at a startup and want free leads from our alpha release? Shoot me a note at mihir@getelucify.com.
