9 ms·

This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it). Two elaborations: 1) General a

by patio11 13y ago

This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it). Two elaborations: 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability. 2) His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and then starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good. (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead." That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing. There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z." I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the-business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)

sergioschuler 13y ago
You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments: 1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". 2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".
- dagss 13y ago
  To me it seems like recruiting of a developer worth anything, from scratch and without an existing team to help you to recruit or lure, must be much more difficult than getting an amazing idea or selling said amazing idea. Is that just because I never tried selling anything? Does anybody have examples of successful startups that proceeded in the way Sergio describes and became successful -- starting out with a business person/team, selling the goods first, then manage to find developer(s) to build it? (It's not rhetorical, I'd love to hear such examples -- the usual stories seem to be revolving around a gang of programmers, or at least a programmer co-founder.)
  - sergioschuler 13y ago
    Look at http://thefoundation.com/ http://thefoundation.com/ , they have some cases about this kind of approach.
  - daigoba66 13y ago
    For the company I currently work for, and at a previous company I worked for, v1 was built by an outsourced development firm long before the first fulltime engineer was hired. Yes it sucked and has since been completly rewitten. But it was a working product that started bringing in revenue and helped raise more money.
  - apineda 13y ago
    Stephanie from https://www.refficient.com/ https://www.refficient.com/ did just that.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the product yourself, even if it's imperfect. Doing so will have several advantages: 1. It will make it easier to find a developer (they will respect you a lot more) 2. It will make it easier to get customers 3. It will make you appreciate the technical aspects of the business Number 1 is the most important. The reason non-technical people have difficulty convincing developers to work on their ideas is that developers tend to look down upon non-technical people, especially "sales types." In addition, most developers have a thousand ideas of their own - you need to give them a reason to work on your idea instead. And that's a lot easier to do if you already have a version 1.0 out there that you have developed and have customers paying for it.
  - red_anorak 13y ago
    In my experience of being a developer and building my own idea I actually found there were occasions when my inbuilt technical idealism caused me to make some wrong decisions on my product. I found it quite difficult to make product decisions independently of technical ones. I've had some really good bosses who couldn't code, though there is certainly a skill in winning over devs when you're not a programmer yourself. There are advantages to being a non-technical founder, if you're able to bring the right techies on board.
  - sergioschuler 13y ago
    In fact I am learning how to program, so I agree with your points - but I don't think it is for every one. There is plenty of space for non tech founders. BUT I do believe it is easier if you do know how to code.
    - antoinec 13y ago
      "There is plenty of space for non tech founders." In the tech startup ecosystem, I don't think there is that much space for founders that don't want to code. Saying "I want to start a tech startup but I don't want to code" is as ridiculous as saying "I want to sell horses but I don't know anything about them and I certainly don't want to have to learn anything about them". It's possible, but you're gonna have a hard time doing it...
loomio 13y ago
It's also useful to remember that until you have an actual product, the company really does not need a sales person, because there is nothing to sell. A startup does need a lot of things besides a developer, like customer development. But customer development is not the same as straight sales! I have seen some teams flame out because there's a sales person there with nothing to sell feeling useless, and the rest of the team feeling like they are dead weight, and meanwhile real priorities aren't getting dealt with.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  > But customer development is not the same as straight sales! The point of the article, what caused my last failure, what almost everyone that bootstraps a business, and most of the ones that received investiment will tell you is that this phrase is wrong. At least in the context of growing companies (not mature companies in mature markets), if you separate the two concepts, you are dead. And that means your sales force should never do just straight sales, and you must hire accordingly. The worst part, I knew (at least in theory) it from the beginning. Not talking to customers is very attractive to developers. But don't mind, it didn't hurt much.
adrianmsmith 13y ago
> 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability. But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point. If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.
- sergioschuler 13y ago
  Cash or no cash, I believe the key for a developer is working on an interesting problem + having impact. If you have real companies offering real money for a product that don't even exist, at least the developer can be convinced that his/her work will have impact.
  - dagss 13y ago
    But I think a strong trend will be that less experienced and less skilled (and over-confident) developers will be more easily lured. How do you counter this trend when recruiting, and filter for the one that is skilled enough but still can be lured? You can't just take any developer to be solo developer for a startup (much harder than team development), especially to work on somebody else's idea.
- jt2190 13y ago
  I read that as selling the venture to the developer, i.e. convincing a developer that the company has all of the pieces it needs to be successful already except for a developer. Note that good freelancers usually have paying customers already, so even they will need some convincing to take on a new client. As far as offering equity to a developer, this may be as weak a move as building a product before proper validation, since it essentially means bringing on an investor before proving that there's something worth investing in.
logicallee 13y ago
I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doesn't make you an actual salesperson, doesn't mean you can convince a customer!)
- cstejerean 13y ago
  Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. Selling the things you believe in to people that really need it is easy. Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult. If anything convincing a developer to take your money (assuming you have any) to write code should be orders of magnitude easier than convincing a client to give you money for something that doesn't yet exist.
  - logicallee 13y ago
    >Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. If that were true then an inventor could have asked a great sales person to sell an engineer on the idea, and build it. In fact, this isn't true at all, and most innovative ideas are forced to be built by the same person in whose head they are, precisely because it is not true that "great sales people can sell anything to anyone", and some of the best ideas can't be sold, but must be built instead.
    - devhinton 13y ago
      This was not brought up but is relevant when a lot of discussion on this article is revolving around the business-developer relationship. >Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult. This is exactly why developers (at least this one) have a pending distaste for business people. This should never, ever, be done. The difficulty of selling 'mediocre products' that are not in 'need' and to people who cannot 'afford' is awful and disgusting. It implies tricking the buyer for your own gain. If you have a mediocre product do not misrepresent when you sell it. If you are trying to fck people out of their money, fck you. The difficult case is what if you invest your livelihood in a product that turns out to be shitty. You are left with either tricking people in to buying it or facing the alternative -- debt, foreclosure etc.. This could include putting a family (wife or husband or partner and children out on the street). This sucks for all involved. Customers wish you had a good product, you wish you did too. This decision comes down to responsibility. You built that product. You were in charge or you bought in to the company. Take the loss, be honest about the product (note sales is still involved just not sales that misrepresents). To be clear, sales is great. If sales is the method of opening people's mind enough to see what you genuinely believe are the best parts of your product. If its to lie and convince them to lie and buy a product that is 'medicore' and they cannot 'afford' (implicitly that this purchase will hurt them in other ways) then fck sales. This 'lying sales' is what the statement indicated and what I, and I think other developers, do not like.
r0h1n 13y ago
I'm a non-technical founder (I have an engineering degree on paper, but have never been a practicing developer) who's starting out on his own. I disagree (or maybe, have an alternate viewpoint) with your first observation. I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains. A great business seller may not actually be a great motivational/aspirational seller, and vice versa. So it's wrong, IMHO, to assume that just because you may be incapable of convincing a developer to join you, you will also be incapable of convincing a customer to buy your product. That said, I'm facing somewhat the same issue myself - so they way I'm solving it is by (a) rolling up my sleeves and trying to build a bare-bones MVP/mockups using relatively accessible tech like Bootstrap, HTML, JS etc. (b) overcompensating for my tech shortfall by giving 2x of what I can in areas like marketing, customer interviews, alpha partnerships, fundraising etc., and (c) using (precious) capital to outsource the first version of my app instead of waiting for tech co-founders. As I see it, it's Carpe Diem. There's no way I can earn serious developer cred in weeks or even months, so I might as well look for alternative approaches instead of moping around, wishing I'd followed the software developer road 15 years ago instead of the MBA one :)
- robomartin 13y ago
  > I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains My experience across a fifteen year business confirms this. Year one I had to sell. As an engineer I was a horrible sales guy. A couple of my dealers took me under their wing and over approximately a year a made notable changes. Years later, as we grew, I had to hire sales people. That's when I learned the lesson. If someone is good about selling product A it doesn't necessarily mean they can sell product B. I hired around a dozen sales people over the years. Most were collosal failures. Some of the most memorable ones came with huge contact lists and years of selling other products in the industry. Based on the advise of other entrepreneurs I ended-up hiring someone with little sales experience and training them over a year. She was my best sales person, by far.
  - jonnathanson 13y ago
    I agree. Sales is often domain-specific, and this becomes truer the longer you spend in any given domain. And sometimes a long list of great contacts is more of a liability than a benefit. You need someone who can call up anybody you need them to -- not just someone who's going to hit up his list every time. The people on the list might not even be the customers you want or need. Hell, who you need may change in two months. In general, a static and inflexible asset in a variable environment is a bad thing. [Side note: there are such things as general "salesmanship" skills, like being personable, charismatic, good at articulating value propositions, good at finding ways to get in front of people, and so forth. But these things need not be conflated with capital-S Sales.]

by patio11 13y ago

sergioschuler 13y ago

You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments: 1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". 2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".

dagss 13y ago
To me it seems like recruiting of a developer worth anything, from scratch and without an existing team to help you to recruit or lure, must be much more difficult than getting an amazing idea or selling said amazing idea. Is that just because I never tried selling anything? Does anybody have examples of successful startups that proceeded in the way Sergio describes and became successful -- starting out with a business person/team, selling the goods first, then manage to find developer(s) to build it? (It's not rhetorical, I'd love to hear such examples -- the usual stories seem to be revolving around a gang of programmers, or at least a programmer co-founder.)
- sergioschuler 13y ago
  Look at http://thefoundation.com/ http://thefoundation.com/ , they have some cases about this kind of approach.
- daigoba66 13y ago
  For the company I currently work for, and at a previous company I worked for, v1 was built by an outsourced development firm long before the first fulltime engineer was hired. Yes it sucked and has since been completly rewitten. But it was a working product that started bringing in revenue and helped raise more money.
- apineda 13y ago
  Stephanie from https://www.refficient.com/ https://www.refficient.com/ did just that.
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the product yourself, even if it's imperfect. Doing so will have several advantages: 1. It will make it easier to find a developer (they will respect you a lot more) 2. It will make it easier to get customers 3. It will make you appreciate the technical aspects of the business Number 1 is the most important. The reason non-technical people have difficulty convincing developers to work on their ideas is that developers tend to look down upon non-technical people, especially "sales types." In addition, most developers have a thousand ideas of their own - you need to give them a reason to work on your idea instead. And that's a lot easier to do if you already have a version 1.0 out there that you have developed and have customers paying for it.
- red_anorak 13y ago
  In my experience of being a developer and building my own idea I actually found there were occasions when my inbuilt technical idealism caused me to make some wrong decisions on my product. I found it quite difficult to make product decisions independently of technical ones. I've had some really good bosses who couldn't code, though there is certainly a skill in winning over devs when you're not a programmer yourself. There are advantages to being a non-technical founder, if you're able to bring the right techies on board.
- sergioschuler 13y ago
  In fact I am learning how to program, so I agree with your points - but I don't think it is for every one. There is plenty of space for non tech founders. BUT I do believe it is easier if you do know how to code.
  - antoinec 13y ago
    "There is plenty of space for non tech founders." In the tech startup ecosystem, I don't think there is that much space for founders that don't want to code. Saying "I want to start a tech startup but I don't want to code" is as ridiculous as saying "I want to sell horses but I don't know anything about them and I certainly don't want to have to learn anything about them". It's possible, but you're gonna have a hard time doing it...

loomio 13y ago

It's also useful to remember that until you have an actual product, the company really does not need a sales person, because there is nothing to sell. A startup does need a lot of things besides a developer, like customer development. But customer development is not the same as straight sales! I have seen some teams flame out because there's a sales person there with nothing to sell feeling useless, and the rest of the team feeling like they are dead weight, and meanwhile real priorities aren't getting dealt with.

marcosdumay 13y ago
> But customer development is not the same as straight sales! The point of the article, what caused my last failure, what almost everyone that bootstraps a business, and most of the ones that received investiment will tell you is that this phrase is wrong. At least in the context of growing companies (not mature companies in mature markets), if you separate the two concepts, you are dead. And that means your sales force should never do just straight sales, and you must hire accordingly. The worst part, I knew (at least in theory) it from the beginning. Not talking to customers is very attractive to developers. But don't mind, it didn't hurt much.

adrianmsmith 13y ago

> 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability. But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point. If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.

sergioschuler 13y ago
Cash or no cash, I believe the key for a developer is working on an interesting problem + having impact. If you have real companies offering real money for a product that don't even exist, at least the developer can be convinced that his/her work will have impact.
- dagss 13y ago
  But I think a strong trend will be that less experienced and less skilled (and over-confident) developers will be more easily lured. How do you counter this trend when recruiting, and filter for the one that is skilled enough but still can be lured? You can't just take any developer to be solo developer for a startup (much harder than team development), especially to work on somebody else's idea.
jt2190 13y ago
I read that as selling the venture to the developer, i.e. convincing a developer that the company has all of the pieces it needs to be successful already except for a developer. Note that good freelancers usually have paying customers already, so even they will need some convincing to take on a new client. As far as offering equity to a developer, this may be as weak a move as building a product before proper validation, since it essentially means bringing on an investor before proving that there's something worth investing in.

logicallee 13y ago

I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doesn't make you an actual salesperson, doesn't mean you can convince a customer!)

cstejerean 13y ago
Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. Selling the things you believe in to people that really need it is easy. Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult. If anything convincing a developer to take your money (assuming you have any) to write code should be orders of magnitude easier than convincing a client to give you money for something that doesn't yet exist.
- logicallee 13y ago
  >Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. If that were true then an inventor could have asked a great sales person to sell an engineer on the idea, and build it. In fact, this isn't true at all, and most innovative ideas are forced to be built by the same person in whose head they are, precisely because it is not true that "great sales people can sell anything to anyone", and some of the best ideas can't be sold, but must be built instead.
  - devhinton 13y ago
    This was not brought up but is relevant when a lot of discussion on this article is revolving around the business-developer relationship. >Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult. This is exactly why developers (at least this one) have a pending distaste for business people. This should never, ever, be done. The difficulty of selling 'mediocre products' that are not in 'need' and to people who cannot 'afford' is awful and disgusting. It implies tricking the buyer for your own gain. If you have a mediocre product do not misrepresent when you sell it. If you are trying to fck people out of their money, fck you. The difficult case is what if you invest your livelihood in a product that turns out to be shitty. You are left with either tricking people in to buying it or facing the alternative -- debt, foreclosure etc.. This could include putting a family (wife or husband or partner and children out on the street). This sucks for all involved. Customers wish you had a good product, you wish you did too. This decision comes down to responsibility. You built that product. You were in charge or you bought in to the company. Take the loss, be honest about the product (note sales is still involved just not sales that misrepresents). To be clear, sales is great. If sales is the method of opening people's mind enough to see what you genuinely believe are the best parts of your product. If its to lie and convince them to lie and buy a product that is 'medicore' and they cannot 'afford' (implicitly that this purchase will hurt them in other ways) then fck sales. This 'lying sales' is what the statement indicated and what I, and I think other developers, do not like.

r0h1n 13y ago

I'm a non-technical founder (I have an engineering degree on paper, but have never been a practicing developer) who's starting out on his own. I disagree (or maybe, have an alternate viewpoint) with your first observation. I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains. A great business seller may not actually be a great motivational/aspirational seller, and vice versa. So it's wrong, IMHO, to assume that just because you may be incapable of convincing a developer to join you, you will also be incapable of convincing a customer to buy your product. That said, I'm facing somewhat the same issue myself - so they way I'm solving it is by (a) rolling up my sleeves and trying to build a bare-bones MVP/mockups using relatively accessible tech like Bootstrap, HTML, JS etc. (b) overcompensating for my tech shortfall by giving 2x of what I can in areas like marketing, customer interviews, alpha partnerships, fundraising etc., and (c) using (precious) capital to outsource the first version of my app instead of waiting for tech co-founders. As I see it, it's Carpe Diem. There's no way I can earn serious developer cred in weeks or even months, so I might as well look for alternative approaches instead of moping around, wishing I'd followed the software developer road 15 years ago instead of the MBA one :)

robomartin 13y ago
> I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains My experience across a fifteen year business confirms this. Year one I had to sell. As an engineer I was a horrible sales guy. A couple of my dealers took me under their wing and over approximately a year a made notable changes. Years later, as we grew, I had to hire sales people. That's when I learned the lesson. If someone is good about selling product A it doesn't necessarily mean they can sell product B. I hired around a dozen sales people over the years. Most were collosal failures. Some of the most memorable ones came with huge contact lists and years of selling other products in the industry. Based on the advise of other entrepreneurs I ended-up hiring someone with little sales experience and training them over a year. She was my best sales person, by far.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  I agree. Sales is often domain-specific, and this becomes truer the longer you spend in any given domain. And sometimes a long list of great contacts is more of a liability than a benefit. You need someone who can call up anybody you need them to -- not just someone who's going to hit up his list every time. The people on the list might not even be the customers you want or need. Hell, who you need may change in two months. In general, a static and inflexible asset in a variable environment is a bad thing. [Side note: there are such things as general "salesmanship" skills, like being personable, charismatic, good at articulating value propositions, good at finding ways to get in front of people, and so forth. But these things need not be conflated with capital-S Sales.]