An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business • Hacker News Board

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#21

Post by bsimpson » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 9:53 PM UTC

I studied entrepreneurship at USC, and this was one of the big lessons. It's a whole school about startups from a non-Silicon Valley POV, and the point they drill home more than any is to get out and validate your concept in the market as early as possible. Talk to people in your target audience before investing in building a product. Every class in the program requires interviewing 25/50/100/etc. "strangers" in your target audience.

In fact, USC's online graduate program for education started this way. They were trying to decide whether to do it or not, so they put up a landing page with a broken buy button and bought AdSense against it. When they realized how many people were trying to buy, they decided it was a market worth satisfying and built the program behind it.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#22

Post by josephlord » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

mesozoic wrote: post #17

pytrin wrote: post #4

This is a good approach for non technical people, no doubt. That is if it really suites their skillset. As a non-technical founder, you are likely good at building and maintaining relationships. You are probably good at selling things. You might be great at framing, so people buy into your vision or get excited about your ideas. These are amazing, difficult-to-acquire skills. Unfortunately, too many non-technical fou…

If they are non technical and don't have the hustle and flow skills then what exactly would they be bringing to a startup generally? Assuming of course it's not money cause money solves most problems.

Potentially domain knowledge, contacts, access, name...

Whether they are what is required will depend on the situation.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#23

Post by sigil » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

drsim wrote: post #20

Absolutely spot on. I would even extend this to developers. Why take a week to build a way to automate something that takes a human half a day when you don't know if anyone is ever going to pay for it? I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder. He made all the deliveries himself to start with rather than building a grandiose delivery platform or hiring. I…

> I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder.

Could it have been Manuel Rosso of Food on the Table? He was the "Concierge MVP" example from Ries's book. They started by meal planning for a single family. If I'm remembering this right, he and his chef co-founder walked the grocery stores each week looking for the best food values, then drew up the week's menu...for that one family.

http://www.foodonthetable.com/

It worked, and they automated things as they scaled.

> I started my B2B company the same way... Now it's completely automated apart from support.

It's great to hear this. A film industry friend and I started a company last year with a very similar approach, but we're earlier along than you are. So far so good!

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#24

Post by TimPC » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

I mostly agree. I just want to specifically say for the games example that as a technical person, I'm willing to work with someone who will prove the game in the real world as a pen and paper game that can be much easier as an online game. Admittedly graphics heavy, programming intensive games I'm less interested in working with a game-designer as a co-founder but for something that's mostly a single screen app it's interesting.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#25

Post by TimPC » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 10:46 PM UTC

TimPC wrote: post #24

I mostly agree. I just want to specifically say for the games example that as a technical person, I'm willing to work with someone who will prove the game in the real world as a pen and paper game that can be much easier as an online game. Admittedly graphics heavy, programming intensive games I'm less interested in working with a game-designer as a co-founder but for something that's mostly a single screen app it's…

And no, I'm not available, I'm quite happy where I am, I'm just saying there are plenty of good real world independently designed board games that could be turned into better online games.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#26

Post by nness » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 11:01 PM UTC

mesozoic wrote: post #17

pytrin wrote: post #4

This is a good approach for non technical people, no doubt. That is if it really suites their skillset. As a non-technical founder, you are likely good at building and maintaining relationships. You are probably good at selling things. You might be great at framing, so people buy into your vision or get excited about your ideas. These are amazing, difficult-to-acquire skills. Unfortunately, too many non-technical fou…

If they are non technical and don't have the hustle and flow skills then what exactly would they be bringing to a startup generally? Assuming of course it's not money cause money solves most problems.

Whole range of advisory, strategic or research roles perhaps. Roles like these don't necessary require strong soft-skills or sales\marketing chops.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#27

Post by swombat » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 11:09 PM UTC

> I graduated from YCombinator a few months ago ( S12 Easel ).

Anyone else bothered by this view of YCombinator as a kind of university programme?

I may be wrong, I have only met a few YC founders and they all seemed like nice, smart people, but it seems a bit off-colour to treat the mere fact that you've been through the YC programme as some kind of "graduation".

Maybe I'm just being grumpy or something... It's certainly not a big deal... but something just rubs me wrong when I read that sentence...

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#28

Post by drsim » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 11:09 PM UTC

sigil wrote: post #23

drsim wrote: post #20

Absolutely spot on. I would even extend this to developers. Why take a week to build a way to automate something that takes a human half a day when you don't know if anyone is ever going to pay for it? I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder. He made all the deliveries himself to start with rather than building a grandiose delivery platform or hiring. I…

> I don't remember the company, but I was inspired by a fresh fruit+veg box-delivered-to-your-door founder. Could it have been Manuel Rosso of Food on the Table? He was the "Concierge MVP" example from Ries's book. They started by meal planning for a single family. If I'm remembering this right, he and his chef co-founder walked the grocery stores each week looking for the best food values, then drew up the week's me…

Ah, it could well be the Food on the Table guy.

All the best for your company!

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#29

Post by bigsomar » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 11:12 PM UTC

This is great advise. You have an idea, tell it to technical person (you do not learn to code, lazy), make the idea a 'technical' challenge (focus on wrong thing) and get stuck in 'technology creates a market'. Create a marketplace and use technology to scale it.

Re: An idea for non-technical co-founders: try a service-first business

#30

Post by knwang » Mon, Mar 25, 2013, 11:39 PM UTC

I would say this is not only for non-technical co-founders, but even for people with technical skills, starting with service, but the type of service whose value is not measured by hours. Then just come up with the engineering to automate said service. This approach has several advantages:

1. You will be working with real, money paying customers from day 1 - right there you are ahead of 90% of startup projects.

2. You get to work your customers to understand their pain points, needs directly, without annoying them - they will actually be delighted that you are trying to understand them better!

3. You have revenue coming from day 1.

4. When you launch your product, you already have a group of people in your target audience, with whom you hopefully have already eared trust.