Ask HN: What do you wish your non-technical co-founders knew how to do?

I would suggest you start with analytics and testing. This way you can test everything and use GA (or whatever) to gain insight into your app/sites usage.

If you wanna really geek out, try to learn HTML+CSS and build some mocks.

Logs? After you review a prod log and notice a bug or exception, you create a bug and assign it to a developer. I guess this could be helpful. But that dev will probably review the same log and do some tests to find a root cause then go fix it. I feel the same for any log review or server/app alerts. Unless you know the code, its simply one interpretation.

Editors? I'm not sure this will help out much.

Git? I think that anything git related will eventually lead you to code.

Testing + Analytics, imo, should be your sweet spot for now.

Good luck.

I think the reason I began trying to understand production logs and bug alerts was more of a calming mechanism than anything else. The developers get the same alerts and are already reviewing the logs, but by me understanding them I rarely need to ask if it's anything to worry about, etc. So it's not really me trying to help them with anything, it's more about knowing when to be worried vs. not, say if a client is launching their site on our platform tomorrow and I see some New Relic error come through at 2am the night before.

I think this depends a lot on the team you’ve got. If you don’t have a technical co-founder or CTO type that’s in charge of overseeing the technical side of your business, then you’ll be well served to familiarize yourself with some of this stuff. Having insight into the technical side of things can help you to better understand the state of your business. You’ll also gain an understanding and appreciation for what your tech guys are dealing with, which can use to better manage them.

Keeping an eye on your code repository (reading commit messages) is a worthwhile exercise. Some of it might be over your head if you aren’t a developer, but perusing a bit will help you understand the state of your application. You shouldn’t need to learn git to do this - GitHub or whichever service you’re using will have a web-based interface for you to browse.

Echoing what others have said, business analytics is a big one. Understanding how to make the most of things like Google Analytics, MixPanel, etc can be very worthwhile. Integrating these into your application is a job that will fall on your developers, but deciding what to track and interpreting the results is something you can/should handle.

Should you learn vi or go digging through logs? It’s probably not the best use of your time, but if you’re truly curious then I say go for it.

+1 on the Analytics and testing side, but what is truely important is that you build a good mental model of the product from a high-level, technical point of view. You don't need to know the nitty-gritty details of implementation, but you do need to know how the varios components of the product work together.

Why would you do that?You are a non-technical co-founder.You have other priorities.You just need a basic understanding of how things work but you don't need to dive into the technical realm.

I am a developer but even I have to admit that some or must of us are too cocky these days, thinking we can do everything by ourselves.That is pure crap.Most devs fail to have a huge impact in the industry as entrepreneurs.That's where you guys come in.Don't think you are useless.You need both parts to make it work.

Contrary to the popular belief a non-tech can be a breaker in a company if he is "that type of guy" with an excellent, CLEAR vision.Yet those are rare indeed.