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Comment by 8jef | Hacker News Reader

I'm an idea-guy who's training himself to code because I find hard to trust clueless technical-guys as co-founders. Everytime I'm trying to talk to a tech-guy about ideas and sales and marketing, all I'm getting is that Bambi look, you know, just before it get hit by the car.

Try get some life experience. Problems are only one question away.

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You raise a couple of very good points that I myself have struggled with.

First of all, as someone who's been coding non-stop since the beginning of college and later on for years for a large corp, I have little to no experience with the "outside world". I have lived in the academia/enterprise-industry programmer bubble my entire life. I can think of ways I would improve bug tracking, programming, source control and other tools that we use day in and day out, but I don't have a clue about how I could help a small business increase their revenues. As you said, total lack of real-world experience.

Second, I often hear the complaint about techies having no clue about marketing and sales. Do you have any suggestions for how we could address that, and perhaps find a common language with the "business guys"?

Look, we are at both ends of the spectrum, trying to reach for the <div align="center"> (tentative coder humour). I could suggest that we exchange emails, doing something like "corresponding". I'm ready to share my load of experience in exchange for and outside viewpoint. jef at 5m dot ca

I'd suggest this: the common language has to be English (and/or French in my case). Nothing is easy, but don't think you got burned the death only because one biz guy took advantage of you and treated you like a code-monkey (taken from you, here, yesterday). There's a lot of decent people out there which are not crooks. One thing you have for you is the commodity to supply code, something tangible (if I may say), where salespeople only throw blah blah in. Protect your belongings. You should make sure the code you write is somehow protected, remotely hosted or something. Why would a non-tech guy get to see your code anyway. Then you have the balance of power. That is if you are forming a partnership. Just my 2 cents.

By the way, I see at least 5 different incredible business opportunities rising from this thread alone. The only thing that makes me worried in hiring a good coder to help me starting these is: lack of trust and lack of funds. That could be solved if: I'm coding myself, at least enough to only sub-contract insignificant bits, OR if I'm "engaged" (that's the word) in a trustworthy relationship with a technical co-founder.

You are definitely looking at the wrong developers. Long ago I figured out that being able to code well was just a portion of being a great developer. Learning how to deliver business value through coding is huge, and it's not been easy (at least for me).

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