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Comment by bananaboy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah in a startup or small business I think every founder needs to do work. You can't have people who only essentially generate work for others. There are so many things that need doing when you're small that aren't directly related to development but still need to be done: applying for grants, tax concessions, marketing, building communities, competitive analysis, market research, payroll, accounting.

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But this is the fundamental point of the article. It's very difficult to do marketing, communities, competitive analysis market research payroll and accounting when you have no money and no product. So what can non-technical co-founder bring to bootstrapping a SaaS platform with just ideas? May not be possible.

>But this is the fundamental point of the article. It's very difficult to do marketing, communities, competitive analysis market research payroll and accounting when you have no money and no product. So what can non-technical co-founder bring to bootstrapping a SaaS platform with just ideas? May not be possible.

You hustle? You sit there and think what is the literal next step, then you try that thing, reevaluate, and repeat. Then keep doing it until you're rich, broke, or dead. There is always something you can be doing.

For some reason the image of a mouse in a cage running on a wheel with a person shouting at it popped into my head here; it reads like the transcript of YouTube motivational videos that on the surface has substance, but are actually hollow.

Doing something is a strict superset of doing something valuable, the key is to bring value, which the quoted comment was addressing.

I agree it may not be possible! I think you need money, or you need to convince someone of the value of what you are building and get them to help you for equity. That's a super hard sell though.

That period of time where a MVP is in development is prime time for a nontechnical partner to be out there talking to potential customers, putting together marketing materials, building an email list. Even without a working product you'll learn a lot and be able to hit the ground running later on.

Waiting until the product is 'ready' to get the wheels turning on sales and marketing can lose you valuable early insights and make it take longer to see if your product fits the market.

> You can't have people who only essentially generate work for others.

This 100% true and an almost unavoidable occurrence when non-technical and technical individuals attempt to start something together. I'd say it's extremely important that if a non-technical individual is coming to a technical one to build literally everything they dream up, said non-technical individual absolutely must be doing an equivalent amount of work in other areas of the company. Sending emails and taking calls/meetings only gets you so far and will eventually be perceived as "0-net" tasks by the technical individual if they don't result in anything.

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