Don’t Write a Single Line of Code
Important Lessons for First-Time Engineer Founders
Does this sound familiar to you?
- Get an idea for a business.
- Run the idea by some friends and co-workers who tell you they would definitely use your product.
- Spend 30 minutes Googling to make sure nobody else is working on your idea.
- Spend a month or two building a “minimum viable product”.
- Start getting customers.
And of course the last step is…
6. Realize nobody wants what you’ve built.
This cycle happens over and over again because engineers love to build things! The two words
initial commit
sound sweeter than any siren song. These words invoke feelings of excitement, hope, and possibility; but they’re also one of the biggest reasons why engineer founders fail to create products people want.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
Creating something nobody cares about is such a common problem we now have fancy methodologies like “Customer Development” and “Lean” to teach us how to succeed. But the truth is these methodologies can be very misleading if you are not in a good market. Why? Because the number one reason why startups fail is No Market Need.
It’s not enough to have a great customer pain, you need to have a great market too!
The Big Pain Mirage
My co-founder and I started FastQS which aimed to help medical device companies tackle the big pain of FDA compliance. Do you want to read some of the requirements? Here you go, be my guest. The FDA CFR 820 is not what I would call a page turner. (But I’m glad our government invests resources into protecting its citizens from crappy medical devices.)
Medical device companies around the world spend billions of dollars every year meeting these regulations. Many of these $100MM+ companies are still using physical paper which they have to sign and file away in fireproof cabinets. I’m not kidding.
This sounds like a great market right? Ripe for disruption? We spent over a year building amazing, easy-to-use apps to address these pains but ultimately we discovered this market was not great for a number of reasons which I will go into at a later time.
Long story short, this brings me back to the title of my post which is…
Don’t Write a Single Line of Code
That’s right. Stop it. Stop coding. Close Atom. Close Sublime. Close Terminal. Close them all! It’s okay to build out a simple landing page to describe what you do but beyond that I forbid you from writing another line of product code.
The following advice applies more so for enterprise (B2B) ideas but could be applied to consumer (B2C) ideas as well.
Sell it before you build it.
Sales. There I said it. I’m sorry but there’s no engineering class at Berkeley called CS61S — The Structure and Interpretation of Sales. It would be nice if there was but I’m not exactly sure how it would be taught.
If you’re the CEO, you need to sell. You need to get out there and you need to convince people to buy your product before it exists.
This doesn’t mean get a verbal agreement or a smile or a handshake. This means get money and if you can’t get money, get a signature.
SALES SALES SALES
I truly believe that if you are in a good market with a great vision and a team that can execute, you should be able to convince someone to sign a letter of intent before you deliver any real product.
Sometimes you might need to show a demo in a sales meeting which might require some coding but for the most part you don’t need one. Even if you are selling something that will cost $5/mo you can still get customers to sign something or leave their email address (not that great in my opinion).
The number of customer commitments you need really depends on the product and market you are selling into. I’m not going to go too much into startup sales tactics but believe me when I say this will save you months and months of anguish.
As engineers we can’t be afraid to get out there and sell. For consumer apps it will be a slightly different story but in the end, everything is sales. I know this sounds really disheartening to engineers because sales can seem lame or unimportant but in actuality sales is very hard. It’s a worthy problem worth understanding.
My Last Piece of Advice
There are many books out there for first-time entrepreneurs but the one I found most helpful is called The Mom Test. It teaches you how to ask the right questions when interacting with potential customers. If you are starting at zero, this book will help you figure out if you’re onto something.
Good luck out there!
