Startup series part two: why building a startup is much harder if you’re not technical
A five-part series on my experience building a consumer startup
This post will be shorter, but I will share some of the important things I wish I knew before starting a business as a non-technical founder. If you missed part one about the origin story and finding product market fit, you can read it here.
Imagine this: you tell an AI in plain language what you want and it writes the code for you. Maybe there’s a human involved who debugs and can help the AI if it gets stuck, but the whole process takes hours or days, as opposed to months. If you are starting now, you’re in luck. Building software will become increasingly cheaper and faster thanks to AI. We’re not quite there yet but we will be, sooner than you imagine. To put things in perspective, as recently as three years ago, this wasn’t an option at all.
As neither Julia nor I were technical, after designing the prototype for the kahla app, we started looking for who could help us build it. We contemplated adding a third co-founder to the mix, but we were also eager to start building. Finding the right co-founder is a process that can take a long time and because founder dynamics are so important, it should not be rushed. Had we studied engineering or anything remotely science-related, we might have had those relationships many fresh-out-of-school engineers have where they often go build things with their buddies.
But we didn’t, so our next best option was to hire engineers to work on kahla. We had a bit of an unfair advantage here which is we’re both Romanian. This meant access to an incredible pool of engineering talent that although still expensive, was more affordable than hiring a team in New York. A brief pause to give thanks to Ciprian at Lateral without whom the kahla app would have not seen the light of day. If you ever want to work with best-in class technical talent, Lateral is it.
The harsh reality, however, is that without a strong personal connection or close network it’s hard to attract great talent. Engineers are super in demand and they will only join a startup if they absolutely love the product or if they get paid a ton of money. Based on the type of tech you’re building, you should expect that it will cost you anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousand of $ to build your MVP.
Which leads me to the next hard (and expensive) lesson: you might end up spending lots of $ on your MVP, but that does not guarantee you’ll find product market fit, which is all that matters if you are to build a successful business. In order to find PMF, you need to iterate a lot and that process if both slow and expensive because it involves constantly shipping code. With kahla, it took about 18 months to have our first ever MVP live and go through only a handful of iterations. If you're outsourcing your dev in the early days, the biggest risk is that you'll run out of money before you find PMF.
Looking back, we definitely took too long to ship - partly because of not having full control over development, partly because of the inexperience that comes with being first time founders. Had we shipped an MVP much faster (2-3 months), that would have maybe shown us that we didn’t have product market fit sooner, which would have saved us time and money. We also would not have focused so much on iterating on our MVP, but rather, test completely new products and ideas and cycle through them until we land on something that really sticks.
Pivoting quickly is also essential for making it though those early days. Even if you work with great talent, if you’re not the one writing code, the process will invariably be slower which also makes pivoting more cumbersome. Depending on what you’re building, you might not require super complex tech, but I’d venture to argue that if you want to build something big, taking advantage of technology - especially nascent or of the moment tech (see genAI) is what you want.
So what can you do, as a non-technical founder to increase your chances of success? Here are my top three suggestions:
Become technical. Julia and I have actually started learning Python - not that we will ever be able to actually ship great code (I believe that ship - pun intended - has sailed), but this give us greater control in both understanding the tech more deeply and making better hires.
Find a great technical co-founder. This is tough, especially if you don’t know what to look for. Emi is fantastic at this and you can book a session with him to learn how to find a great technical co-founder. I should also mention that not having one hurts your chances if you want to apply to accelerators like Y Combinator that require you to have a technical co-founder.
Processize before productizing. If you read The Minimalist Entrepreneur - which I highly recommend - Sahil offers a great framework for testing your ideas before writing one line of code. Take any feature you want to build, and test it manually with real users to figure out whether it solves a problem or not. Can you do it in a spreadsheet, with a PDF, in a call or through text messages? Whatever it is that you’re trying to test, take users through the entire process manually and only then decide if the response (aka engagement) is strong enough to spend any time or $ building it into a product.
Coming next:
Part three: Fundraising lessons and crazy VC stories
Part four: Applying to and getting rejected by tech accelerators
Part five: Identity as a founder, pivoting, and whether it’s worth building a startup in 2024