One of the best sources of information on startups is the obscenely talented Paul Graham who has written a wealth of essays on the subject. If you read a lot of these though you start wondering if the only route into the world of web startups is to be a developer or computer engineer of some kind. When I think of top web entrepeneurs, people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Page & Brin of Google, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Evan WIlliams of Twitter & Blogger all spring to mind. Even less-obvious founders like the internet media personality and Digg founder Kevin Rose actually began in computer science. So it all begs the question, if you’re not from a tech background do you even have a shot at starting a web startup?
Non-Technology Driven Startups
The first question to ask is, is your startup idea technology driven? Are you inventing new technical solutions to a problem? In the cases of all the founders I just mentioned the answer was yes. Facebook was a new way to manage social interaction, Google was a new way to search, Amazon was a new way to purchase, both Twitter and Blogger were new ways to communicate, and Digg was a new way to determine the relevance of news. They were all completely new technologies or applications of technologies.
But it would be a mistake to think that that is the only kind of web startup there is! Thanks to years of internet progress there are existing technologies that virtually anyone can piggy back off. In most instances they still require some development, but it’s the kind that you can generally easily hire. Here are a few common examples:
- Publishing / BloggingThere are a wealth of off-the-shelf tools available for publishers and bloggers, and it’s possible to build a veritable media empire out of them (think Gawker Media), or to simply carve out a really solid, small business (think Problogger). Blogging tools, video hosting services, image hosting services and the like, all make this a very accessible place to start up.
- E-CommerceBecause this was the first big front of online business, there are again a plethora of services you can build with. Services like Volusion and Shopify or DIY products like X-Cart, are numerous and often quite mature. These days you can even outsource fulfillment to Amazon’s Fulfillment services. It might be hard to be the next Zappos, but there are plenty of niche spots. I know of a couple of completely non-tech guys who started a successful bag e-tailer back in Australia called Rushfaster that I use every year for gifts. The web is full of these sorts of openings for a savvy startup.
- Community and Social SitesI don’t know how easily you can make money in this line of business (the fact that Facebook isn’t profitable is probably a good warning sign) but creating online communities certainly is possible. Between the long traditions of forum and chat software and the rapidly growing areas of social networking services, you can build a significant community online without much in the way of hardcore development. Sure, creating a custom community application can still be challenging, but services like Ning and Kickapps can also easily serve as a platform.
Just so there is no misunderstanding though, don’t think that building a business in any of these areas is easy! I am only saying there is certainly no requirement that you be a developer or have strong knowledge of development.
The Web Itself is Still Very Much Technology Driven
So the web has evolved a lot, and there are lots of services you can build businesses on. But pull off the hood and underneath it all is still the raw development machinery of technology stacks and computing infrastructure. What is possible online is determined by the technology available and to what extent you can manipulate and use it. If you use a piggy-back services like those mentioned above, you are simply being shielded from the technical requirements of the web by another company. In other words you are outsourcing the technical aspects of your startup.
Fundamentally the web is technology driven and to build any type of new service you need a pretty good grasp of what is going on to know whether it’s even feasible. It’s one thing for example to describe a great business – “We’ll build a search engine that understands context, and doesn’t just look for a specific word!” – but it’s altogether different to know whether it’s doable in any reasonable way.
In a technology driven industry, not being able to determine feasibility is a pretty significant problem. How do you know if an idea is fundamentally flawed or inhibited by a technical drawback?
For Non-Trival Tasks It’s Hard to Hire Good Developers
The obvious way past this hurdle would be to hire the skills you are missing. If you can find a developer or development team then you’ll have the capabilities to tell you what is feasible, what is not, and then to actually build the thing.
Hiring people has a whole load of accompanying difficulties in any situation – trust, reliability, personalities and so on. Hiring developers has a bunch of new factors to throw into the mix. You see it’s pretty difficult for a non-developer to tell if a developer is any good. There are an awful lot of mediocre developers around and determining which are which involves a lot more than looking for qualifications on a CV – in my experience these can mean not a whole lot.
If you are a non-developer and need to hire one, I can’t recommend enough reading this article: How to Recognize a Good Programmer.
Assuming you are building a reasonably complicated site or service, you need someone good. A mediocre developer is likely to lead to flaws and bugs, poor performance, missed deadlines, unreliable estimates and code that is hard to build on. It’s a little bit like hiring someone to build your house who does a shoddy job of laying foundations, measuring doorways, tells you a 1 year job will take two months, and generally creates problems that run-on after they’ve finished the job.
All in all a mediocre developer is likely to simply be inefficient, which is another way of saying long-term expensive and that is something no startup can afford.
My Own Experience Hiring for a Technology Driven Startup
The founders of my own company, Envato, have no real development experience at all. Out of the four of us, we had two web designers, one graphic designer and a physicist! The main application we operate – FlashDen – is a very complicated beast that today has a development team of six working fulltime on it.
The one thing we had going for us is that I have somewhere in my murky past a computer science minor to my undergraduate degree and an aptitude, if not interest, in computing. When a guy I knew from an old job applied for our development position, I thankfully had the good sense to recognize some of the qualities that make a good programmer and we hired him. Through this mix of chance and circumstance, we ended up with a developer who turned out to be far more talented than we probably deserved. He’s still with us today and not only instituted a strong culture of good development, but has been a foundation to build a strong team on.
Given how difficult the startup road was, even with this bit of fortune, I shudder to think where we might now be had we hired some of the other candidates I reviewed.
A Better Solution – The Developer Co-founder
In my opinion an optimum solution for building a technology driven web startup when you aren’t a developer is to find a co-founder who is. This is better than hiring for a number of reasons:
- Hiring a good developer is not cheap. You get what you pay for and given how critical this position is, you can’t afford to be stingy. A developer co-founder means cutting back on a significant expense.
- Your co-founder has as much to lose as you do, so they have their heart fully in the project. It’s hard to replicate this dedication in a hire.
- Your co-founder will stick around, not potentially leaving you with a tech startup and no tech skills.
- Your co-founder is there in the planning stages, helping develop the product, rather than being brought in to build something you’ve already planned (and potentially not bothering to tell you that it kinda sucks).
- A developer co-founder unlocks a lot of unexplored possibilities. Just as you may not know an idea is unfeasible, you may also not know that something is feasible!
Finding a co-founder is as difficult, if not more, as hiring. You’ll need to find not only a good developer, but also someone you get on with, want stuck to your business for ever and ever, and generally trust. Shelfmade’s blog has a great article on finding a technical co-founder that is worth reading if this is the position you are in.
Understanding the Web
Regardless of whether you build a technology driven startup or not, perhaps the most vital attribute of an online startup founder is a deep understanding of the web, what sorts of things are possible, what works, what doesn’t work, what people want, and just as importantly what they don’t want.
Ultimately being a developer is not an essential criterion of founding an online startup. But it sure does seem to help!
Excellent article, perfect!
Great article Collis. I think it really boils down to having some well rounded knowledge about the web and variety of emerging technologies to give you that cornerstone to create a good start up. Which you explain well here. Great information in this post for sure.
Thanks!
All the points you make are valid. Certainly, knowing software development in general and web development specially cannot hurt in anyway.
I believe this applies specially to startups which have not been able to raise any significant funding, which is likely to represent most of them in the near future. Having funding, you would still be left with the, not so easy, task of hiring an effective developer or development manager.
Still… In all the companies you mentioned, the key point was an a vision of how something could be used or extended in a new and unique way. This seems to be the key trait of the successful web entrepreneur.
So, while being a developer or having a good one in your quarter does help, it is a consistent vision of where you want to go and achieve that is essential.
Excellent point Mauricio, you can tell I innately talk about bootstrapped startups (because I’ve never had any experience with the other kind) but you’re totally right, with funding I suppose you could definitely hire a dev manager who in turn hires great talent.
I was, once, one of the second batch of people hired to work for a startup that was about six months old. It had started with 50M USD of obtained in a first round of funding after the 3 original partners had started it with 2M of their own money.
That kind of money can certainly facilitate the first steps, but is no assurance of success. In that same company I had contact with another person who had worked in a company which burned through 500M USD in just six months during the excitement of the Web bubble leaving behind nothing but the example of what not to do.
I very nearly moved into creating a web application without development experience by simply a hiring a contractor but I realized the complications that could arise in the future. I’m sure the developer was a very good one, as I’d been following their blog and company for over a year but the idea that the development of my business was reliant on an external entity made me worried.
I may revisit web apps in the future, but for now I’m sticking to blogging and content publishing in general because it’s what I really know.
NICE article.
I’m a developer, and last year another guy and I partnered up on a large project (14 sites) that neither of us would have done without the other. I build the sites and provide the content. He provides funding – though at quite a discount. In return I get 10% of all sales, keeping up the monthly maintenance and marketing. There were already existing sales, and sales have increased since we’ve been going. If he sells the sites I created he’ll give me 20% of the sales price because my income will have vanished.
These kinds of arrangements are difficult because often the non-developer doesn’t understand that good developers are NOT going to want to invest hundreds of hours in your project for the hope of some commission at the end. If your project isn’t already making some money then – it’s a big jump of faith for a developer to start dedicating a lot of time to the project.
The developer has to trust the other party and vice-versa.
There must be a contingency plan in effect for the future. The developer must get a % off the sale of the sites… he/she can’t just lose all the monthly income because the other partner (owner) decides to sell one day.
Finding these arrangements is difficult. Start with friends and acquaintances. There’s a lot of trust issues, but if you find the right partner – it’s a really great way to go.
Excellent article and I’m going to re-read it here in a minute. Will grab your RSS feed too.
Great article. I have been struggling with this question for some time. I come from a design/multimedia background with some development experience, but not enough to start a web venture on my own. The points you make have given me some ideas on how to move forward from here.
Thanks for posting this article. Being right brain dominant, I definitely need some help in the development area. My background is web and graphic design. While I am also quite interested in coding, I am not that good at it yet. Plus, I am a bit more interested in the big picture and front-end design. That being said, I have been working on a startup of my own and have recently come to realize the importance of finding a good developer who I can build a solid business relationship with. Thanks again for the post.