A day in the life of a non-tech founder.
I don’t know if I’d call imeyou successful as yet, we’ll just be coming out of private beta in two weeks! Our journey so far is just an example of the innumerous possibilities, woman founder who doesn’t code, a team of minions (as they call it), a slack prototype, an ambitious idea, blah! blah!.
I personally think that the idea you have to code is an investor driven mentality. When someone gives you money to do something technical they want to know if it will get done. They doubt if a non tech founder could actually build the vision, or will just delegate.
And the harsh reality is that nobody values that we made it happen this far, the hardships of having done what we’ve done, and people just don’t get it that good things take time. I knew absolutely nothing when I decided to go all in and build this platform, and it was a fairly risky move for me leaving aside a professional career. I just decided to do it and get it done. There is so much hype in tech about the way to do things but that is all BS. There is no formula. In fact, if you stick to a formula you will probably fail. So my secret? I don’t listen to anyone. I don’t read exaggerated media stories. I just do whatever it takes to do what I want to do. I also know when I don’t know something and I find someone who does to help me.
I learned quickly that being an unproven founder with a very strong idea about what I wanted to build is not the most appealing thing to engineers who could do anything. I cannot tell you how many engineers I talked to. I struggled. And I used to be a recruiter, I am still a recruiter. It’s a very, very humbling experience. Recruiting an engineer who knows react native with a meteor backend is no easy thing.
I never stop learning. I don’t even know if I am actually a non-technical founder anymore, I am more of a “product” founder now. When I started I had just little idea what a wireframe was (seriously) and now I can pretty much design the whole thing.
I’m not really a “designer” or a “UX” person, there are people who we’ll hire in the future who I hope will be a million times better than me, but I can get it done. I read like crazy, I try new tools, and I just keep learning. I think this is the most important thing any founder can do. Are there times I wish I coded? Sure. And for me if I learned anything it would be front-end but in reality I just wouldn’t have time to do it.
Learning to code isn’t the only option any longer if you have a vision for the next big idea.
