Business Dev for Engineers, pt. 1
the first step is admitting you have a problem
For some reason, the ideas I’ve had tend to hinge more on business than technology. Instead of inventing new search engines, I’ve worked on creating marketplaces. After failing to find success, I became insecure about my ideas: maybe if I was smarter or more experienced, I’d write a new super-efficient compression algorithm. How easy would that be to sell? Instead, I can barely use tar from the command line.
Then it dawned on me: I’ve been drawn to business-heavy ideas because they seem easier. I mean, how hard could it be to build a marketplace for personal trainers? Or a service to provide on-demand dog-walking? Build a website, make it more beautiful and functional than existing solutions, be more efficient — how hard could that be?
I get passionate about ideas I find attainable, but my judgment was flawed because I gloss over the business hurdles. Just as it’s kind of confusing why computers can sequence the human genome but not understand simple conversation, I’ve been confused as to how I can work really hard building an awesome product and a week later have no users.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/1nmkfq/
Thinking about Chris Sawyer writing Rollercoaster Tycoon by himself in x86 assembly fills me with enough awe and wonder to make me question my own self-worth. (Damn it! I can’t even git rebase.) But when I think about Uber’s growth, Pinterest’s growth, or Zenefits’ growth, I react differently — I think “hey, I wonder if I could do that” or “those guys were lucky to be in the right place at the right time.”
I’ve also been drawn to small, fun business anecdotes. One of my favorites is Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, going into the Palo Alto library and changing the homepage of every computer to Pinterest. How cute! I could do that! Unfortunately, these anecdotes convinced me Business Stuff is all fun and games. I haven’t heard many equivalent engineering anecdotes.
I am drawn to business-heavy ideas because I think Business Stuff is easy. This is because I don’t know much about Business Stuff.
There is good news, though! It’s tar -xvzf. I think. Wait, is that right? Anyway, the other good news: working at a startup that needs Business Development…is slowly teaching more about Business Development. For example, it’s called BD for short. I thought I’d start this blog series with some of the BD lessons I’m learning along the way.
The first lesson I learned: acknowledge the difficulty of solving business problems. They’re real, and deserve just as much attention as the design of your product.
In my next article I’ll acutally talk about a few business problems we’ve encountered. Because, after all, admitting you have a problem is the first step.
