What Does The Business Guy Do Pre-Launch? | Hacker News Reader

What Does The Business Guy Do Pre-Launch?

swombat.com

50 pointsgatsby15 comments

Answer: Look for technical co-founders

I'm joking, but seriously, those first 8 bullet points are nothing that technical founders can't do. And if I was working on a startup, it really wouldn't make sense to me to give someone co-founder equity to do just those 8 things that I could easily do myself while building the product too.

"easily do myself while building the product too"

Depends on the scale and product. IMO having developers do things outside of development (aka distractions) is a big waste in the early stages.

> it really wouldn't make sense to me to give someone co-founder equity

The problem is you're thinking of your co-founder as some kind of technical-coattail-rider. But ideally your co-founder is better than you at product and market research, dealmaking, finding advisors and general networking. Your argument only applies to the all-around inferior co-founder, in which case no you shouldn't "give them co-founder equity" regardless of whether they are technical or not.

You're right, I am biased here - the reason being is because I actually used to be a "business guy" before, worked in finance and have since turned into a coder, and I've also failed. Because of that my standards for a business guy are extremely high, if I was ever even thinking of linking up with one early on, because of my background and experiences.

Though I'll also argue that all else being equal hacker founders have a huge leg-up over non-tech founders for executing and surviving, esp these days. Online marketing, iterating, and design are all technical in nature and if you're a business guy, it's likely going to be your first time going through these sort of hurdles, big risk.

Your standards for any co-founder should be very high.

I have to agree with dasil003. You're making all kinds of biased and unfounded assumptions about basically half of the world of founders. Saying that online marketing is technical in nature and that a business person probably has no prior experience doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know any hackers who have the depth of marketing experience that I have, and very few who have managed as many people across as many types of job functions, which is crucial to running an entire business. That being said, our technical founder is obviously crucial, as is the founder in charge of our music department. Every founder should bring something important to the table, and most founders are no good on their own.

In my opinion, for a two person team, both have to be technical founders and at least one of them has to have some product sense to build anything useful.

For a three person team, however, you can afford a dedicated business person. There is certainly value in having somebody around who is _willing_ and is _looking forward to_ taking on all of these things.

Having said that, to me a business guy is defined by his experience. Loosely defined, I can call myself a business guy just because I'm willing to take on responsibilities that are not coding. And I believe I will be as good (and bad) as any other inexperienced business guy. Our respective backgrounds and education will mean absolutely squat when it comes down to getting the business off the ground. This is why a business guy with no experience is just an empty term to me. Until he has started and ran a business he is no more of a "business guy" than I -- we're both just "aspiring businessmen" and only one of us can code.

Agreed. I think one of the best posts ever on startup advice was by @yegg in "Paths to $5M for a startup founder" - http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/06/paths-to-5m-for-...

The biggest dilution comes from co-founders and it's so very important to keep the team lean with people who can out-execute competition.

Don't ignore the opportunity cost of that approach. Every hour you spend on those eight things is an hour you could have spent developing the product.

After reading the Sternberg and Tenner articles on this topic, I noticed that they forgot one major thing: it's sometimes the business guy who's the lead founder and in charge of the product direction. I'm going to be a little biased here since I'm the "business guy" of the startup I'm working on, but having a guy who knows the product well yet is constantly in the market chatting to people is very important. If the lead founder is also the developer, the product often has a tendency to be technically incredible, but lack the market connection needed to sell. By bringing a business guy along once the product is "ready", he's selling something that he didn't create, which is so much harder to do.

Now I'm not going to say that every startup must have a business guy leading from the beginning, there are a ton of developers that have incredible business sense. What I am saying is that it can often be a disadvantage to have the guy coding the product be the guy that leads product design. Your decisions become jaded by what you like doing and what you don't like doing, and a customer focus is hard to maintain. Taking a step away from the code and having a guy who understands software dev, yet is focused solely on market intelligence can make all the difference.

I previously worked with a successful startup that had a CEO who had never actually seen the code of his company's platform. It didn't matter to him. He was talking with the customer every day, knew what they wanted and was able to convey it to the developers. As a graduate of Software Engineering, he still knew how to code, but his vision wasn't hampered by the day to day grind of actually coding it.

Obviously there's many ways you can be successful in a startup, but creating a great product is really only half the battle. If you can have a software-intelligent, externally-focused "business guy" leading the charge, you can make sure that your great product doesn't go to waste and you have a market for it when it's complete.

I stopped short of saying that in the article (I was trying to make the point that even if you're not working directly on the product, there are many things to do in a pre-launch startup), but you're absolutely right! I actually had a sentence that I cut out which said something along the lines of "By the way, if you're a 'business guy' on a startup but you're not at all involved in building the product, you're probably doing something wrong!" - however, I don't feel I'm in a position to make such a generic statement, especially in view of the counterexample of Seth Sternberg himself.

I do feel that the 'business guy' should be involved in the product development/leadership, though, as you feel.

Very fair. That's the great thing about startups, there's no magic formula. What works for one group probably won't work for the next.

But I would say this, if your a business guy and you don't have much of a clue how the product works, sit down with a developer and chat for an hour or two. You'll probably be a little bit overwhelmed, but you'll definitely have a new appreciation for the product and hopefully be able to talk in a bit more depth in the future (where appropriate).

I think the most important thing is missing: Selling the product!

The notion that you can't sell a product you haven't created yet is prevalent in tech circles, but it isn't true. I did a startup some years ago where we got around $10.000 worth of sales with nothing but handwaving, smooth talking and powerpoint. The product launched a few months later. Our investors loved it because it was a serious indication that we had a product that someone would buy, and that we were able to sell it.

This isn't unusual, especially in B2C markets. Tech guys just often seem to miss it, probably because there are a lot of incompetent people out there calling themselves business people. A good business guy is as hard to find as a good hacker.

It seems like the only real problem with this article - the one causing any contention - is simply that no one really specifies what time frame they mean when they say "pre-launch."

Any time from the point where people get together and say "hey, I have this idea..." to the point where real users start using your product (and paying for it, if it's a paid product).

There's many things to do pre-launch.

For a consumer product, they can include: 1) Starting a blog and establishing yourself as an expert. At the very least, at least get some content out there for search engines to crawl.

2) Establishing yourself in forums. This is important because if you just sign up as a new user when the product is done, don't expect anyone to take your pitches seriously. If you got some reputation under your belt though, people will listen.

3) Email leads You want to start a relationship with people, especially bloggers. Don't talk about selling anything to anyone, or even talk about your idea. Just ask questions, get to know them, and when the time comes, you can either tell them what you did, or say "Hey, look at this, I just found this out..."

4) Brainstorm about network effects. There's the product but there's the other stuff that helps makes the product more viral. They can include things such as widgets to embed in blogs, etc.

5) Get some links to your site. This is in line with #1. If you start a blog, the links will naturally flow in. This will lessen the time until search engines gives your site more trust. If you can launch your site in 2 steps, do so.. For instance, if there's a section for content(articles, how-to's, etc) and a section for the actual product, launch the content first.

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