Don't Learn to Code | Hacker News Reader

Don't Learn to Code

ryanhoover.me

22 pointsrrhoover14 comments

Congrats Ryan! I've been asked a lot recently about how to get into growth. My immediate reaction is to say "build something you want and try to make it grow". But that takes an incredible amount of time and has a lot of risk, especially if you don't know how to code.

A better recommendation is to build, say, a landing page for your idea. Drive some traffic with ads or whatever. Harvest intent from those people, and talk to them as potential customers. Iterate and optimize this process, and you'll be practicing "growth hacking" with more agility than most companies.

There isn't a line of code involved at the start, but there are about a dozen skills needed: creating & optimizing a PPC campaign, crafting a clear marketing message, using tools like unbounce or optimizely to iterate messaging, doing customer development interviews, etc.

Only when you know you have meaningful interest do you start to build.

They don't really teach this at university, so I'm really excited to see Tradecraft take off.

Good thoughts, Ivan. I wrote this relevant article, Pain = Validation, a while ago: http://ryanhoover.me/post/54951607013/pain-validation

Also, today's Startup Edition is on the very topic of how to validate a startup idea - http://t.co/E2D4IdODhe

Yeah, I noticed the Startup Edition theme after writing this comment. How timely!

IMHO to be a good product developer, you not only have to learn how to code. But how to design, how to handle people, how to grow, how to sell. And if you also want to be the CEO you'll have to learn a lot more.

It's one of the most demanding jobs you could ever have. You have to think about the product as a whole, in the present and the future. And if you don't know what's happening under the hoods, if you don't know how to speak to programmers, or don't know what's possible within the current state of technology, you'll never be a complete product developer.

At least that's what I want for my career.

I'm a programmer who is very interested to learn about how to gain traction. To be honest, I am skeptical about how complex that domain of skills and knowledge could really be. Note that I did not say hard, I said complex.

My belief at the moment is that gaining traction is mainly a matter of creating or selecting/evolving the right idea and then largely comes down to social network effects. Basically, I look at startup traction as being largely a popularity contest and about who or what is lucky enough to become trendy.

I think traction is about understanding underlying human psychology / user intent. At the end of it all, it is still humans who are using these products (for now at least :)

Someone who deeply understands customer interviews and needs-finding will do a better job of scoping the right product to build, and someone who understands what drives human behavior will do better at distributing the product.

+1 for Misha's response.

Yes, luck and timing are a big part of startups but there are processes and ways of thinking that you can learn to increase chances of success.

What sort of process or way of thinking would that be? I mean without giving away the whole store, (since I think consulting on that is your business) maybe there is a comment you can make that would give me ideas for things to google.

There is nothing wrong with that theory -- it's just the difference between asking IF a tactic worked vs WHY it worked.

If is easy to determine. Why is not.

This is a great article and you can read countless examples the importance of sales and marketing for tech focused startups or small web based businesses. I agree 100% with most of what is being said. Also very cool to create a bootcamp focused on the other end of the business.

The irony of the title, Don't Learn to Code is realized in CTA of tradecrafted.com. Under Business & Social, point 3 is "Basic Programming"

Maybe this should be renamed to: Don't Learn to Code, [much, yet, etc.]

I just point this out because there are varying degrees of what people mean by learning to code. I don't believe that learning to code is bad for anyone, just as I don't believe that math, reading, writing, literature and the arts are either.

Are there any self directed guides to traction or learning this stuff outside of attending a bootcamp?

Exactly. Everybody should learn the fundamentals of code/programming, but that doesn't mean everybody should learn to check-in production level code -- that's not a code allocation of resources.

RE content, there is a TON of material out there, it's just poorly organized.

I think Kickstarter has helped greatly in the area of traction (obviously, it doesn't apply to all situations). If you can successfully communicate an idea - and there is demand for it - you can marshal support.

Kickstarter is a good platform for collecting money for ideas that aren't real yet but most of the people I've talked to say that just being on the platform is not enough. You need to apply your own traction tactics to the campaign.

Jeff Atwood in 2012: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-t...

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