Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

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(Not the original poster but have a similar background).

#1 advice for engineer-founders is to always be questioning whether coding is the best leveraged use of your time.

As a bootstrapped engineer founder, I spent way too many months (years?) coding non-stop, even after we got past PMF, despite having the revenue to hire engineers to replace me day-to-day. These days I do zero coding, and am still equally happy and fulfilled. At least for me, spending days coding was a really easy way to feel productive, but it wasn't the best use of time compared to hiring, marketing, sales, company culture, etc.

#2 advice for founder-engineers: after you're able to stop coding, remember that your product is worthless if no one knows about it or if no one is using it. Once you get product market fit into a good place and have revenue traction, it's time to spend your nights thinking about marketing and sales rather than code.

TLDR: always make sure you're spending your time in the most highly leveraged areas. Hiring and delegating. Coding is rarely the highest leveraged area your time can be spent.

Thanks for sharing.

I think the #1 thing most bootstrappers struggle with is finding the right market, idea, validation etc. As much as people say “ideas are overrated” I increasingly think that’s not true, it’s that a good idea has to include things like “can realistically get done by a self-funded tiny team and make revenue soon” which the “idea guys” rarely have.

As far as not coding too much, I’m increasingly finding this true. One thing I’ve noticed is that most non tech founders outsource development and most technical founders don’t even though technical founders can outsource far more efficiently since they can play more of a “tech lead” role rather than hand it to a dev shop. I really regret not hiring designers sooner since I’m bad at it and there’s tons of affordable talented designers on Upwork.

Still, hiring is a little nerve wracking since it eats into your runway. It’s really tough to know when to burn money or time when you have minimal or no revenue. After PMF , hiring makes sense but before then it’s really ambiguous how to make that call.

It's not hard to come up with a highly profitable, but morally bankrupt idea. It's anything that serves those on the top of the food chain: a new creative way to enchance the survelliance machine, etc. But most of the engineers are firmly attached to the ideas of truth and goodness, and so they struggle with ideas that also fit their moral constraints. Big firms understand this, and create a layer of fake goodwill to shield engineers from the reality of what pays their salary. That being said, morally upright and profitable businesses exist, but it takes some nontrivial intuition to invent one.

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