Don’t have time to read the article? TL;DR Want to be a technical founder? Add Zero to Sold by Arvid Kahl to your reading list and you won’t regret it.
Summary
I am a full time engineer at a large tech company, and have recently been reading more and more on how to start my own business.
So far I have read over 10 books on entrepreneurship and this one trumps them all: Zero to Sold.
Why? This is the only book I found that heavily focused on being a technical founder. This meant building a company from scratch including the technical takeaways the writer shared from building his own startup.
In this article I will go over five of the most eye-opening takeaways:
- Build Something They Can’t Live Without
- A Business That Can Run Without You Is Sellable
- The Less Exciting Your Tech Choices, the Better.
- The Most Impactful Things Are Also the Hardest Things to Do
- Create Standard Operating Procedures
Build Something They Can’t Live Without
Build a “need-to-have” instead of a “nice-to-have.”
Kahl highlights that unless your product becomes something a customer cannot live without, it will be harder to keep them around. Nice-to-haves are the first to be tossed when budget cuts are being made, while need-to-haves are held on for dear life. Figure out for your audience what is extremely painful for them in their daily work life, and then remove that pain.
“A Business That Can Run Without You Is Sellable”
The more dependent your business is on you, the harder it will be to convince an acquirer to buy your company. Automate, automate, automate. Notice common themes in your tech stack and outside your tech stack. Are multiple customers asking for the same troubleshooting questions? Create a help article instead of responding to them directly. Is your deployment process still manual? Create a button that will automatically finish the deploy for you. The more things are automated, the easier it will be to hand over the work, and the easier it will be to sell.
“The Less Exciting Your Tech Choices, the Better.”
While a new tech stack might be intriguing to you as an entrepreneur, now might not be the time to try it out. You risk the chance of a dying community (or lack thereof), limited resources, or even worse, it being shut down completely. Instead of creating your own implementations of complicated features, see what already exists and incorporate them. Do you want to spend weeks creating a SSO riddled with vulnerable bugs, or use a resource like Auth0 that you can trust will be more secure?
“The Most Impactful Things Are Also the Hardest Things to Do”
Usually, the most impactful things are also the hardest things to do. Start with those things. Don’t take the low-hanging fruit. It is usually the first thing your competitors will also pick. Go for the things they fear to tackle. Do this often. That is how you will stay ahead even if things don’t seem perfect.
It can be enticing to pick the low-hanging fruit. As engineers, we often feel the most accomplished by knocking out features quickly and checking another thing off our to-do list. Avoid that temptation by vigorously prioritizing the hard but rewarding work required for your audience.
Create Standard Operating Procedures
DOCUMENT EVERYTHING!! I always thought this was only important as the company grew (why would I need to document everything if I’m the only engineer/founder?), but that is not the case. The earlier you start documenting everything, the easier it will be for you to sell your company or hire new employees.
Conclusion
As someone who has yet to build a product with paying customers, these are my key takeaways from Zero to Sold. However, there’s much more to gain from the book depending on where you are in the startup process. I would like to express my gratitude to Arvid Kahl for generously sharing his learnings and providing valuable insights to aspiring technical founders.
