One Thing Every Entrepreneur Should Start Learning

If you are an entrepreneur or aspiring to become one, there is one skill you must learn. It’s not sales, marketing or finance. It’s coding. I don’t mean that you should be the master of programming, but you should know enough to grasp the fundamentals. Most of the non-technical founders underestimate the importance of the coding.

Of course, non-technical founders have other skills such as finance marketing sales and so on, but understanding the fundamentals of the coding language can allow non-technical founders to have a better understanding on the business by enabling them to understand the things they did not understand before.

You could be the master of non-technical skills, but you should build a sound understanding of coding, and here are some reasons why you should start learning soon.

You can Kick Start Your Business

If you have an idea that you want to develop into a business by creating an app. You can start promoting your idea by designing landing a page, building a website or creating a mail list. If you have some fundamental programming skills, you can do all of these smoothly.

If you have advanced skills, you can even take small steps to build your prototype. Creating a prototype of your business will enable you to show it to other people, so that you can get feedback, and have an understand whether your product has a market for it. You can even catch interest from the investor and raise funds.

I am not saying that you should be a coding ninja, this would take time, and you would be too late to start working on your app until you reach a sufficient proficiency in programming. It’s better to hire someone who is good at developing apps.

If you understand how the programming works, it will be easier to communicate with the freelance developer to clearly explain what is it that you want.

Learn Coding To Unlock Another World

Great entrepreneurs are great innovators. You need to be more innovative to reach the level of the greatest entrepreneurs. Learning to code will unlock a new perspective for you.

Coding allows you to see the world differently, you could discover many innovative opportunities that you never thought about before. If you already have the non-technical skills such as marketing sales and finance, you could combine them with programming and discover many untapped lands.

Improved Communication With the Technical People

Have you ever had an instance where you are sitting on the same table with your tech team, and you have no idea what they are talking about?

If you say yes to question I mentioned above, then don’t worry its normal. If you want to overcome the communication hurdle, you need to have a fundamental understanding of the coding.

Think about it like this, your tech team is speaking another language, and you don’t know their language, then how are you going to lead and communicate with them efficiently if you are not speaking the same language with them?

Can you communicate with people who only speak Russian if you only speak English? The same thing applies to your tech team. Learn their language to be on the same page. In the Russian case, you could communicate with hand gestures, but it won’t work on tech talks.

You Don’t Have to Rely On Other People’s Expertise

Let’s say that you have a great idea and you are ready to talk with an agency or freelance developer. But just because you don’t know anything about coding means that you have to rely on what the freelancer or agency says.

When you are negotiating a price for an app, pricing is based on an hour spent on the project. If you have no technical background, then you will have no idea on how long your app would take to develop, and this is bad. I will explain why below.

If you are told that, your app is going to take 200 hours to develop, your only option is to trust the developer and settle on whatever price he charges. You don’t know if the app would take 200 hours to develop or 150. If you had an understanding of how app developing works, you would be able to asses how long the project would take and negotiate on price.

Lack of coding knowledge could lead you to overpay to developers. It is also hard for you to measure the quality of the project since you lack the required skills. You better enroll to software programming course as soon as possible.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +400,714 people.

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