Is Doing Everything Yourself As A Founder The Right Thing?
When someone says “startup founder,” most people picture a nerdy programmer. He is so good with technology that he came up with some cool idea and implemented it overnight. While some of the founders are like that, this stereotype is quite outdated — it’s 2020 now, and being a 10x programmer or even being technical savvy is not the most important thing for a startup founder. In fact, there is much more to this role than just coding. A lot of tech guys I know who tried starting their own companies realized that all they want and can do is coding. Founder role means that you have to deal with marketing, sales, hiring, management, fundraising, customer service, legal issues, and many more things that tech guys don’t want to deal with.
My story as a non-tech founder
I’m not sure if I wrote this before, but I was a non-technical founder too some time ago. I learned to code when I founded my second startup because I thought that if I learned to code, everything would be so much easier. I was judging based on the previous experience — I was struggling to get everything adequately implemented while working on my first startup. The developers I was working with at that time didn’t seem to get even the basic stuff (or so I thought), and we spent a lot of time re-doing things that seemed obvious. Probably something every non-tech founder with little experience managing developers stumbles upon. So, I thought things would get easier because I’d be a client and developer at the same time. I thought I would know how to do everything right the first time. It turned out I was wrong.
I ran into almost the same problems hired developers ran into when I was building software myself. Coding everything myself turned out to be a terrible idea. Suddenly I was too busy with writing code, testing it, fixing the bugs when they popped up, thinking about how to implement next features without breaking what’s working and other things a software developer was responsible for. I didn’t have much time for other sides of the business. It got even worse when the platform started to get traction — I had to open a brick and mortar shop, hire sales reps and customer service & delivery team. Eventually, there was no other choice than to hire developers who would take over the coding part so that I could focus on the founder role. I still had the benefit of understanding how developers work, knowing the architecture of the whole system and all, but it simply wasn’t worth spending five years learning all that. If someone in a similar situation would ask me now what to do, I’d recommend learning to manage developers instead of learning to code and doing it yourself.
Do it yourself or have someone else do it.
It’s a tough choice every tech entrepreneur has to make again and again in every aspect of an early-stage business. The answer becomes more evident as the business gains traction, and the budget becomes available to hire people or companies. Although in the beginning, when funds are limited, the first choice is often to save money and DIY as much as possible.
Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work long-term; at least it did never worked for me. I figured that I would rather work on a day job and make enough money to pay someone than go all-in. Why? Because you can’t be outside of the process to make the right decisions and be inside of the process actually to do things, the perspective is too different. For example, if you have a brick and mortar shop, your goal as a business owner is to attract more people to the shop and make sure that you have the right goods to sell. If you start working as a sales rep in your shop, you simply have no energy for marketing.
You save X dollars on not paying the sales rep, but you lose 2X because you’re not doing any marketing, for example, and there aren’t any visitors. It makes more sense to have a day job that is 9 to 5 and spend the money to pay a sales rep and the marketer. Not only will you be able to do something more important for the business, this approach is also more stable. A lot of things in the business can take a lot of time to figure out. If you have a runway for only a few months, you will have to close the company if you can’t at least pay yourself after you run out of cash.
When doing everything yourself makes sense
Every situation is different. There are cases when doing things yourself does make a lot of sense. For example, there are jobs for which you simply can’t hire an experienced professional. Marketing is one of those, by the way, and so is coding. Good luck finding the person who will be able to set up the marketing department for you if you’re not ready to pay a very good salary and offer decent benefits. I surely wasn’t able to — when I had to build a marketing team, I could afford to hire just a Head of Marketing Dept, and there would be no money left for anyone else. The only viable alternative was to learn everything myself and then hire experts in separate areas.
With software development, it’s somewhat similar. Senior developers who can act as a foundation and a leader to the team are quite rare and expensive. If you can’t afford to hire one senior developer and senior developer yourself, you’ll have a hard time managing a team of junior or even middle developers. But software development is still different from marketing because the software doesn’t have much cultural context compared to marketing. Developers in Eastern Europe write code the same way they write it, say, in Japan, and most of them know English pretty good.
Marketing, on the other hand, is very market-specific. None of the marketers from Eastern Europe that I spoke to were able to create a decent strategy for a US market, mostly because of the cultural differences. They have different social networks, different media contexts, they can’t communicate in English well and don’t really understand the US audience. I’m sure there are plenty of talented, experienced marketers all over the globe who specialize in the US market, but from my experience, they are as expensive as marketers in the US. I guess it’s mostly because the number of experienced marketers is much smaller than the number of experienced developers. It makes sense. If I would be an experienced marketer, I would simply run my own businesses.
