Coding is Communicating
Why you want experienced entrepreneurs building your product
The founder’s dilemma
What is the most precious resource for any startup? The natural answer is cash. Cash enables you to hire people, to buy equipment, to market your products, to grow your company. Startup co-founders that have secured VC funding strut around like made men. Cash is king.
It would follow, then, that you should always try to save that cash. Keep the burn rate low. Spend as little as possible whenever possible. Take leftovers to work for lunch instead of eating out. Don’t buy a Tesla when a Nissan Leaf will do.
But here’s the thing: cash is not the most precious resource for any startup.
Quality is.
Quality is what differentiates your product from the next guy. Quality is what catches a user’s attention in the first place, and it’s what keeps them coming back. Take this blogging platform (Medium) for example. Everything about it feels refined — not just pretty, though it is that, and not just functional, though it is also that, but completely, thoughtfully refined. It shows me exactly what I want to see, and nothing more; it lets me to do exactly what I need to do, and nothing more.
This is not by accident, of course. This is by design, both literally and figuratively. Medium was built by experienced entrepreneurs who had the benefit of a tremendous well of collective wisdom from which to draw as they iterated on each aspect of the design, and the UX of each feature.
The quest for good value
But what does the creation of Medium by a top shelf digital design shop have to do with your startup, you ask? Well, as you work through iterations on your product feature set, you are constantly working to achieve balance across a few key factors: time, cost, outcome. In a word: value.
Here’s a quick and dirty way to optimize that equation: find the cheapest engineers who can build your product in the shortest time, and voila! great value. Typically the cheapest engineers (if calculated by dollar spent per hour worked) are the ones you can hire full time and then get them to work days and nights. You know, the ones fresh out of college, who don’t know any better, or who don’t have anything better to do.
It turns out that’s actually not very good value because all hours are not created equal, and working your employees to the bone is the best way to burn them out, rather than make your startup succeed.
Another way to look for value is to outsource: I have worked with high quality software development outfits in both India and the Ukraine, and have heard anecdotally of many more. This is a good solution if you have the ability to provide proper direction and oversight, and if the Quality your product must deliver has already taken shape. In this case, you get what you pay for—code/designs/product that satisfy your requirements.
But what if you don’t have all the answers up front? In fact, I think it is safe to say that nobody has all the answers up front. Or ever. It takes a great team to come up with a great product. And in the real world, where you are rapidly creating and evolving your product, incorporating feedback as effectively as you can, you don’t want to have all the decisions resting on your shoulders. You need to be able to lean on your team. To be able to trust them. To be able to rely on their experience and look to them for guidance when you don’t know the right answer.
Coding is communicating
When I build a feature into a product, I don’t just execute steps according to a recipe. Typically the guidance on the feature is fairly loosely worded, and presumes an understanding of a broader product context plus a set of relevant user stories.
In situations like this, even though one of my hours is a relatively expensive one, I provide good value because that hour is spent not just coding up a feature, but also thinking about how the code I write will fit into the bigger picture of the rest of the product’s code base, and equally important, how the feature will speak to its users. Embedded in my subconscious is the question: “how can I ensure this feels like Quality?”
As an entrepreneur, I spend time every day talking about my company with family, peers, clients, and prospects. Communicating product and business ideas clearly, and within the appropriate context, is a task entrepreneurs meet on a daily basis. Until you are on the front line, it is difficult to understand how integral this exchange is to the success of any business.
As a coder, I bring that experience with me to every implementation decision, knowing full well that the way I build my next feature will send a message. I work hard to ensure, as the creators of Medium have successfully done, that the message will be: “this was built with you in mind.”
