How to learn business skills as an engineer? | Hacker News Reader

How to learn business skills as an engineer?

1 pointGekuke14 comments

I just don’t get it. I just want to build software to give to someone else to sell it. Do I really need business skills when building a startup?

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Usually in my experience a startup requires some business acumen to succeed. The two common paths are

1: learn the business skills as you go. Difficult, but we see successful examples of this (perhaps outlier; selection bias). The biggest difficulty is balancing your time between competing needs, but you must have that skill if you wish to be any kind of founder.

2: find a businessy person to partner with as co-founder. Risks, but this is the path YC tends to recommend. Good comments about this made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38477057 - so much is relevant even though it is from the other side (business guy looking for techo).

The software builder path you envision is typically strewn with failures - possibly just because failing is the default for a startup. I have seen plenty of very capable engineer-types try to succeed using your plan: I think the most common reason for failure is building something that nobody wants to buy.

IMHO good engineering is making choosing great compromises. Business decisions are also about compromises. Spend your time wisely, and most importantly avoid wasting time on stuff that isn't key.

I wish you the best of luck, and good skills.

You've not defined "business skills" with this question so the answer is just as hazy. I mean, yes, you need business skills, but how much, and how good you need to be at them is the real question. You need to open a bank account. You need to pay taxes. You need to set a price for your product. Those are business skills that you have to be able to complete when building a startup, but if you can write code, you can do those things. There are additional business skills needed, but whether you learn to do them, and do them, or hire someone else to do them is up to you. The best thing about being a business owner is getting to pay someone else to do the stuff you don't want to do.

This is exactly what the apps store model was invented - some else to do the distribution. I think you definitely can just be a builder with the trade off being that the deal maker will take a cut - maybe even the majority cut - from any sales made.

How else will you know what to build?

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