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Comment by kaspm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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