Comment by BilalBudhani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BilalBudhani | Hacker News Reader

I was in the same situation as yours 6 months back. I left my job and persuaded my desire to startup. Turns out it takes more than being great at coding to build a startup. I'd to learn Marketing, Pitching, Emailing etc. skills in my journey which I never thought about before starting up whereas, I thought building a good product would cover that part. So, I'm not scaring you away from starting up but I'm just saying that you should consider these points as well in your decision making process.

I've gathered few questions and important points which I would ask/tell myself before starting up again. Here are they:

1) Do you have a co-founder which can leverage your skills?

2) Have you zero down on an idea and did your market research?

3) How confident are you about the target market?

4) Do you have a execution plan or Goto market strategy?

* Market first, product later

* Ideas are worthless unless they're executed really well.

Thanks,

Turns out it takes more than being great at coding to build a startup. I'd to learn Marketing, Pitching, Emailing etc. skills in my journey which I never thought about before starting up whereas, I thought building a good product would cover that part.

This reminds me of my days teaching test prep classes for Kaplan. At some point in every Kaplan teachers career, there came a point when you'd do the math and realize that Kaplan was charging students $100/hour but only paying you $20. Inevitably a few of the best teachers would try to go out on their own. They soon realized that getting students took a lot of work - putting flyers up on campus, working your network looking for referrals, building a word of mouth reputation. Most ended up failing and coming back or moving on to something else. There were a few that made it big (e.g. Robin from TestMasters) and it turns out that these were not necessarily the best teachers, but they were definitely excellent marketers.

I agree 100%. I think marketing is the most important thing with almost any business. My rationale is I'm not going to get better at it while writing mindless code. The best way to get better at it is to market products, right?

It sounds like you'd be happier in a product management role than as a programmer.

Kick ass on the code for a couple years (you might find that you enjoy it if you can get out of Java Hell and start doing functional programing) but, from the sounds of it, you'd be happier as a PM. PMs get a bad reputation because 80% (or more) of them are idiots, but the other ~20% can be invaluable for their ability to market technical work, internally and externally.

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