Ask HN: Non-tech founders, what are your biggest tech challenges • Hacker News Board

Post by boy88 » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 3:16 AM UTC

My co-founder and I are working on a course for non-tech entrepreneurs who would like to build an MVP in order to validate their idea(s) but who lack the required technical skills to do so:

http://www.omg2mvp.com

Despite all of the recent hype around the need to learn to code, we believe that it isn’t necessary to know how to actually program in order to build an MVP, however there is a certain requisite skillset that every non-tech entrepreneur needs to have in order to be an effective and useful co-founder, and get results from their developer.

Being marketers who have taught ourselves these core technical skills and used them to launch a number of startups and digital products, we now want to share our experience with the global community of entrepreneurs and we’re currently developing a guide for non-tech founders that will help them up-skill in relevant aspects of startup engineering as well as showing how to go about securing a tech co-founder.

Below is a list of questions that we would love to get your feedback on:

1) Is this a course that you believe would assist you with your challenges as a non-tech entrepreneur? 2) How much would you be willing to pay for such a course? 3) What are the biggest tech challenges you face as a non-technical founder?

Post by phantom_oracle » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 9:06 PM UTC

Interesting idea, but let's fix some things before I answer your questions.

Firstly, technical bible? You do realize that quite a few christians in prime markets like the USA might take offence to this? The world is full of a lot of sensitive people, so try another catch-phrase without including any religious element/s.

I like how you categorize the landing page with pictures + text. Even though I am someone who might read all the text, most of your target audience are likely impatient, so you could probably get away with: more pictures and big catch-phrases (you could use a "learn more" link below each catch-phrase) or use some type of video instead. People seem to like videos, but keep it at 40 seconds max.

1) Your core idea only comes towards the end of the page. It first seems like you are addressing the 'problem' of being unable to code but wanting an MVP and your final solution is "I will help you find a tech co-founder". There is a broken link there. Would it assist a non-tech founder though? Definitely (if you get your marketing right)

2) Very little. Then again, I may be the exception here. There are plenty of people out there who have 'brilliant' tech ideas and might be willing to pay like $10 or maybe even $25? You can't ask people to give you pricing options when you yourself don't know what to value the course at. Maybe a freemium model might work too.

3) I can't answer this. I know how to code basic things. The problem with learning to code is the disconnect between what codecademy and its ilk teach you and what building an MVP is. Plus there are a ton of tools out there where you can build a basic not-so-technical app or site. A tough question to answer though...

Goodluck!