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> sees themselves as the ideas person More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You ne

> sees themselves as the ideas person More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
CTO = Builder first, then lead the building of both the technical systems and engineering culture. CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload. (n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
- RangerScience 3y ago
  I've been at more than a few startups (one that could be called some form of high+ growth, although it was ultimately unsuccessful), and this tracks. People do what they know; CTOs know how to build, CEOs (usually/often) know how to "business develop", marketers market, PMs design... People do what they know.
incangold 3y ago
This. Over and over. Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business. I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners. The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall. Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long. Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell. CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision. I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO. So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses. These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better. We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    > I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier. Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth? (For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
    - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
      I think it's still true. Bootstrapped businesses need to bring in money to pay the bills. They can't just dump VC money into growth. Sales is just as essential if not more with a bootstrapped business.
      - ljm 3y ago
        At some point you'll want to switch from sales-led development to establishing product though, otherwise your product will simply be a hodge-podge of feature requests meant to satisfy individual clients with no real cohesion, especially if you want to go self-serve. Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
        michaelt 3y ago
        It depends on your product and industry. If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business? Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike. If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)
pc86 3y ago
Honestly I don't even believe you need a decent idea. There are thousands of boring businesses, including in software, that make a ton of money. Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  find one pain point or use case that resonates with at least a subset of people.
- balder1991 3y ago
  I really think this is the way. The world is full of shitty software made by bloated companies who can’t sell it cheaper, and you just need to be able to do it better and cheaper to win the clients. The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    The problem is actually higher ups network and or sales/marketing. You'll be amazed at how those CEOs and sales people can sell trashes at diamond value. Tech cofounder will need them as CEO cofounders.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  But also, do your research; the world doesn't need yet another todo or note taking app with cloud storage as payment model. Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space. Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc. One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

CTO = Builder first, then lead the building of both the technical systems and engineering culture. CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload. (n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)

RangerScience 3y ago
I've been at more than a few startups (one that could be called some form of high+ growth, although it was ultimately unsuccessful), and this tracks. People do what they know; CTOs know how to build, CEOs (usually/often) know how to "business develop", marketers market, PMs design... People do what they know.

incangold 3y ago

This. Over and over. Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business. I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners. The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall. Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long. Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell. CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision. I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO. So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses. These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better. We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.

sharemywin 3y ago
I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > I'd rather find someone with marketing and sales experience than anything else. Good sales people can hone in on the parts that part. They want to invest in the things that make selling easier. Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth? (For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
  - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    I think it's still true. Bootstrapped businesses need to bring in money to pay the bills. They can't just dump VC money into growth. Sales is just as essential if not more with a bootstrapped business.
    - ljm 3y ago
      At some point you'll want to switch from sales-led development to establishing product though, otherwise your product will simply be a hodge-podge of feature requests meant to satisfy individual clients with no real cohesion, especially if you want to go self-serve. Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
      - michaelt 3y ago
        It depends on your product and industry. If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business? Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike. If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)

pc86 3y ago

Honestly I don't even believe you need a decent idea. There are thousands of boring businesses, including in software, that make a ton of money. Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.

sharemywin 3y ago
find one pain point or use case that resonates with at least a subset of people.
balder1991 3y ago
I really think this is the way. The world is full of shitty software made by bloated companies who can’t sell it cheaper, and you just need to be able to do it better and cheaper to win the clients. The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
- fendy3002 3y ago
  The problem is actually higher ups network and or sales/marketing. You'll be amazed at how those CEOs and sales people can sell trashes at diamond value. Tech cofounder will need them as CEO cofounders.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
But also, do your research; the world doesn't need yet another todo or note taking app with cloud storage as payment model. Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space. Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc. One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.