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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 w

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 :)
      - sharemywin 3y ago
        you still have hand hold larger clients.
    - user_7832 3y ago
      How significant would this be if you have nearly negligible running costs (beyond say the cost of registering a business and renewing it)? Starting from a semi-hobbyist position where I would be the first client (think something like the stuff on Hackaday or tindie), I'd imagine nearly zero other bills. (I'm talking about a very low volume, building-in-your-garage type of thing.)
- andoando 3y ago
  Depends, cause a good salesman can be selling 10 different crap easily.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Amen. Build it, or sell it, there's no third seat on this ride.
djtango 3y ago
Something I've always reluctantly admired about Apple (as an anti-fan) is their love of details and the work they pour into so many details that people will never notice. My personal favourite is how good the iOS keyboard was ahead of its competitors for so long in the early days of iPhone. Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted. For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Apple was never praised for its original ideas - although they had some I suppose - but always for their execution and improvement of existing ideas. Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better. On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
  - pavlov 3y ago
    As both a Tesla customer and a long-time Apple customer, there’s a massive difference in the experience. Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing. Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
    - whiterknight 3y ago
      The PR turnaround for Tesla on HN is incredible. Shows how effective peer pressure from journalists is.
whiterknight 3y ago
This matches my experience.
thomasrognon 3y ago
This describes my current situation so precisely. The only thing keeping me on is the engineers I brought in and the initiatives I'd like to finish. I'll probably "retire" early in a few months and work on passion projects.
andoando 3y ago
Exactly what our startup is now. CEO is super good at sales, but that also means were running around executing 10 different ideas with no cohesion whatsoever.

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 :)
    - sharemywin 3y ago
      you still have hand hold larger clients.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    How significant would this be if you have nearly negligible running costs (beyond say the cost of registering a business and renewing it)? Starting from a semi-hobbyist position where I would be the first client (think something like the stuff on Hackaday or tindie), I'd imagine nearly zero other bills. (I'm talking about a very low volume, building-in-your-garage type of thing.)
andoando 3y ago
Depends, cause a good salesman can be selling 10 different crap easily.
intelVISA 3y ago
Amen. Build it, or sell it, there's no third seat on this ride.

djtango 3y ago

Something I've always reluctantly admired about Apple (as an anti-fan) is their love of details and the work they pour into so many details that people will never notice. My personal favourite is how good the iOS keyboard was ahead of its competitors for so long in the early days of iPhone. Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted. For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Apple was never praised for its original ideas - although they had some I suppose - but always for their execution and improvement of existing ideas. Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better. On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
- pavlov 3y ago
  As both a Tesla customer and a long-time Apple customer, there’s a massive difference in the experience. Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing. Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
  - whiterknight 3y ago
    The PR turnaround for Tesla on HN is incredible. Shows how effective peer pressure from journalists is.

whiterknight 3y ago

This matches my experience.

thomasrognon 3y ago

This describes my current situation so precisely. The only thing keeping me on is the engineers I brought in and the initiatives I'd like to finish. I'll probably "retire" early in a few months and work on passion projects.

andoando 3y ago

Exactly what our startup is now. CEO is super good at sales, but that also means were running around executing 10 different ideas with no cohesion whatsoever.