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Ask 37signals: Can I build a product business if I'm just a designer?

37signals.com

1–6 of 6 posts

Re: Ask 37signals: Can I build a product business if I'm just a designer?

#2
Making development environments for non-programmers that are useful to non-programmers and possibly flexible enough to create real products seems pretty hard.

I know a lot of programmers are very skeptical of anything like that for various reasons.

Re: Ask 37signals: Can I build a product business if I'm just a designer?

#3
I've been working with brilliant people who don't know how to program. They have been very valuable and very capable of building a business. But in a typical startup you get to that phase where everyone is working full throttle and then what happens is that these brilliant people do stuff like manual data cleansing work for weeks on end simply because they cannot bring themselves to learn how a loop and a regex works. That's a shame. Trouble is that sometimes that kind of work cannot be outsourced because it requires intimate knowledge about the project to do it right.

Re: Ask 37signals: Can I build a product business if I'm just a designer?

#6

I've been working with brilliant people who don't know how to program. They have been very valuable and very capable of building a business. But in a typical startup you get to that phase where everyone is working full throttle and then what happens is that these brilliant people do stuff like manual data cleansing work for weeks on end simply because they cannot bring themselves to learn how a loop and a regex works…

That the "business person" in a typical startup doesn't have anything better to do during the build phase creates typical startups, in my opinion. Brilliant people should be doing brilliant things. If they're not, maybe they're not.