$2,800 in MRR and growing without code. Should I learn to code?
Question:
I have built a service to $2,100 MRR in 8 weeks and should be able to reliably add between $500 and $1,000 in MRR each month based on my conversion metrics.
The service was built using Streak CRM, G Suite, and Zapier. I do not know how to code.
Should I learn to code over the next 6-12 months in order to build a more robust solution?
Context:
Inspired by IndieHackers, I launched the service in July that straddles the line between consulting and SaaS. To my clients, it feels like a medium-touch consultancy; most of the heavy lifting is semi-automated with Streak CRM, G Suite, and Zapier.
My current "infrastructure" should scale to about $10-15k MRR before becoming too cumbersome. (By that point I'll want to add advanced features beyond the current scope anyway.)
I'm eager to learn to code and want to turn this into an 8-12 month challenge.
Other helpful notes:
- The business is essentially a two-sided marketplace so a potential SaaS implementation would probably look a bit like Airbnb (that's a gross oversimplification but could be helpful)
- My clients pay ~$100/month and although still early, none have churned
- 90% of my time is focused on growth. The actual business takes very little time to operate.
Edit: I just realized the discrepancy between the title of the post and the post itself. I launch new clients at the beginning of each month. September revenue was $2,100 but I have my next 7 clients signed on for October, hence the $2,800 figure in the title. Sorry for the confusion!
Want a technical cofounder? I could help build the product and mentor you (technically) as we go. I've got passive income in the 7k range right now from sites I've built, so I have some free time and have been looking for another project.
wow! 7k? Can you write a post about it?
Sounds like your mental power and energy is best used in sales and marketing if you managed 2k MRR in 8 weeks... Congrats btw ;-)
I'd actually ask why you want to code it yourself at all? Probably to be a true self sustaining solo founder?
If you need to split your time between growth and development my bet would be that your growth will slow down... so besides picking up coding as a private hobby look at it from the business point of View.
Who is going to take over your marketing and growth tasks while you learn and scramble with coding? As a founder, would you allow your best sales person to go and learn how to drive a delivery Truck, visual design or coding on company time?
Just my thoughts... ;-)
You're exactly right, Patrics. I've become quite intrigued by the idea of becoming a completely self-reliant solo founder; inspired in no small part by many of the great businesses featured on IH built by "solopreneurs".
That said, I'm realistic about what my core competencies are (sales & growth) and would never want to jeopardize that momentum.
Part of me was hoping I'd have a few people saying: "You'd be surprised at how much you can learn and build in 12 months. Go for it!" :-)
Being so young, the business is still in a very tenuous position so for the time being I foresee myself doubling down on sales & growth and worrying about how to improve the product in the coming months.
I can totally relate! I loved to build each part of the early system myself because "Its fun, its quicker and I know how to fix if something crashes..."
Until it's not.
In the end its easy to build the system until "80% works most of the time". But the other 20% is the stuff where you sink hours of your life, countless nights and weekends just to find a single bug or try to figure out how to integrate xyz, etc.
But let's put it another (more positive) way ;-)
"Hey twb, you'd be surprised at how much you can learn and build in 12 months. Go for it!"
However before you start. In your position I'd be patiently growing it and wait until MRR is up to 10k - then you are in a more comfortable position:
If you want to talk, feel free to get in touch...
Great, great, great advice, Patrics. I think that keeping my head down until $10k MRR makes the most sense.
Could you elaborate a little bit more on your business or provide a link to your website? I guess that would also help to evaluate the scope of the whole project.
Wow. You're off to a really impressive start. I just saw this article on HN yesterday and I think you would find it helpful:
https://www.process.st/mvp-app/
That led me to checkout Bubble and The Code Free Startup and I thought both were really cool and might be helpful for you, but it sounds like you've already got a good system in place.
Good catch, John! Even though I'm not a hacker, I peruse HN regularly and found that same article. I'm going to dig in once I have a little time this weekend.
Congrats. G Suite, Zapier, and Streak are all great tools.. I use them in my stack as well.
If you are a newbie coder, unless you are an outlier genius (actually possible in this case), nothing that you can build in 6 months is going to be more robust than Zapier
I would try finding a technical partner to implement the product. I would be happy to help you with this.
We are developing a new pattern for software development where you pay based on utilization; we're calling it SaaSaaS. In other words we build your SaaS tech for you, as a service.
If it's a good fit, there are a variety of ways to finance this and when to transfer it to you, but it sounds like you have enough cashflow to finance development.
Thanks, CFC!
In the end, working with a technical partner probably makes the most sense. My skillset is sales and growth, not tech.
I'll be sure to keep you in mind as this project grows/develops.
Can you share your website or tell more about the business? I think their are more ways to grow then to code it (and think you make it scalable).
Hi bramk,
I actually don't even have a website at the moment. I've been ruthlessly focused on revenue and profitability from day 1. A website wasn't necessary for that.
In a nutshell, I'm helping small brands grow their wholesale business by streamlining the way they present and get feedback on their products from independent retailers around the US.
It's quite similar to SubmitHub (albeit in a completely different industry) which was showcased here on IH a few months ago. SubmitHub helps recording artists get their music heard, reviewed, and posted by influential music blogs. My service helps small brands get their products seen, reviewed, and ordered by retailers.
wow sounds like a great example of utilising your strengths in a niche. Did you work in this area before?
I did. I grew a small brand's retail footprint to about 1,000 locations around the country in a little less than 2 years. It was extremely painful and I saw an opportunity to try and streamline the process.
I'm cautiously optimistic about the business but happy that the early indicators are that people are finding the service useful.
Amazing! That's where I perceive a lot of value and power is. Knowing the market in and out, pain problems, already potential clients + loopholes and fix it with automation/tech solution. Hope to read more on your progress! Consider writing about your journey!
Thanks, Kirso. When I have some more time I think I'm going to put together a post on IH, outlining what I did to get this off the ground. Glad to hear that you'd be interested in hearing more!
My suggestion is to go slow on the co-founder route, based on my own experience. Start with hiring a part-time consultant, and then see where it goes. Don't look for a co-founder right away. It takes a lot to find a good match, and many times you think its all good until things start going the wrong direction.
Thanks, bitonator. This is a really important point and a driving force behind wanting to learn for myself. I've seen, and been a part of, too many good companies that fall apart due to co-founder strife.
I'm also not looking to build the next Stripe; most would describe my ambitions for this project as a lifestyle business.
Same experience here twb lol. How about I help you you coding and you teach me sales?
Hi twb,
Greeting from Australia :-). I think there are several points here and I'd like to share my experience with you as a non-tech founder who's gone through a similar, build a business without tech, and learned to code after to take it further before finding tech co-founders and raising a round. I've also started a business while I was in school and I grew it to about $5k monthly revenue. It was a mix of a sass/service businesses teaching people to code.
The lesson I learned that could of value to you are:
Learning to Code is super important, despite if you are tech founder or not! Doing it alongside a startup/tech idea is a really great motivator and driver for me to keep learning.
An 8-12 month challenge to build something, in my opinion, is too long. For me, I started learning how to build landing pages (HTML, CSS, Flexbox), integrate MailChimp so I can A/B test my growth channels. I then go on automating some of my more laborious tasks in Javascript (spend hundreds of hours googling what to learn...). Learnt to build the front end in React.js (again, took me days figuring out which framework to invest my time in) and so on...
Finding a co-founder/tech partner is hard... Really hard. I've recently gone through something similar and the best analogy I have is that it's like a marriage. You want to optimize for success base on who you choose. It's something you should never rush into.
this link back to learning to code. You want to be really resourceful, competent, and able to build some level of your MVP. This means that you can now communicate with potential tech co-founder, contractor and judge if they are actually good or not. If they tell me something would take 4 weeks, I now know if they are doing things efficiently and if they are wasting time on things that we don't immediately need.
I actually end up putting all my resources in one a little pet project and created a simple AI that will crawl the internet for really great content and filter out the ones I don't need base on what I'm building, and lay it out in a logical path for me: http://heycody.io/
Love to her your feedback!
Hope that helps!
Thanks so much for the thoughtful response, vinba! I'll be sure to check out Cody.
I am in a similar spot and found great answers here in the comments. Thanks for posting and the great thoughts from the guys commenting.
I think the main question should be "Do you want to learn to code?". You can learn a lot in twelve months for sure, but it is quite a commitment you’re making if you don’t know whether it’s for you. If you don’t yet know, just try an online video course from Udacity or something similar.
If you do decide you want to learn how to code, there’s a lot of ways to go about it. I think the Udacity Nano Degree programs are pretty interesting, but they use Python on the backend. Which language you should learn is dangerous territory, but I personally feel that either Ruby or Node.js are good picks. Python is easy to learn, but Ruby (+ Rails) and NodeJS have a bigger focus on the web. Ruby on Rails is very mature and stable and offers more structure to beginning programmers. NodeJS is the new kid on the block, it’s big advantage is that it’s JavaScript so you learn a language you can use on both front-end (browser) and the back-end (server) of your website.
Hope this helps :)
That's really helpful, mattijs. I may dip my toes in the water and see how a few courses feel.
I've worked in tech for the majority of my career (always in a sales/BD/growth role) so learning the basics of coding would never be a waste of time assuming it doesn't take away from growing this business to a point of sustainability.
I think @patrics comment a little further up the thread really hit home though: "'80% works most of the time'. But the other 20% is the stuff where you sink hours of your life, countless nights and weekends just to find a single bug or try to figure out how to integrate xyz, etc."
I think in general I've just been really inspired by many of the entrepreneurs featured on IH (e.g. SubmitHub) and visible on Twitter (e.g. Pieter Levels). Although I don't underestimate the amount of work it would take to learn programming, I'm probably romanticizing outliers in a way that is unrealistic.
Either way this has been a really informative thread for me and I appreciate your and everyone else's feedback.
No problem :)
Last advice I would maybe give is not skipping the foundations. There are a lot of courses out there promising you things like zero coding skills to everything up and running in 30 days. In my view that’s just not realistic unless you take a lot of shortcuts. This is fine if you just want to validate your product. But if you’re in it for the long haul, this will come back to bite you. You won’t understand everything that’s going on in your service, and it will be harder to trace bugs and write maintainable code.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should do all the heavy lifting yourself. By all means use frameworks and libraries to help you out. But I feel spending some time learning the basics of programming will save you time in the end.
Best of luck!
I would check out http://www.rubythursday.com. Melissa has an awesome course that teaches how to build an AirBnb style 2-sided marketplace site via Ruby on Rails. It's a big course - the app is fully featured and not a toy/clone app, but if you've played a bit with code you should really dig it!
It depends on what you want for your career. Do you want to run a business or be a CTO? You can do both at the same time, but remember time is your biggest asset.
From a pure business standpoint, I recommend focusing on your energy to the most important part; growing it as much as you can.
I'd grow your business to $10K with the current setup. Then I'd hire a CTO. I'd motivate and incentivize her competitively to grow this business from $10k to $100k.
Thanks, yigit. I think getting to the $10k MRR mark is going to be my focus for the next few quarters. At that point I'll be in a much different position to bring on additional technical help if needed.
I've been thinking the same. My plan is to make enough money from code-less SAAS to allow me time to catch up and learn to code.
Given you are in this fortunate position I would use the financial cushion you have to learn coding.
Thanks, petecodes.
Have you started thinking about how you're going to approach learning to code? This is the step that I find, as a "business" person, to be the trickiest. The sheer number of languages and courses out there makes it feel like a daunting decision.
I know what you mean!
I'm just starting to learn but I think the best thing is don't get bogged down in obsessing over which language is best. They all do the same thing in slightly different ways.
Everyone says you have to learn javascript so that's a given. Personally, I'm working on learning PHP and Python as they are generally seen as beginner friendly.
I did find the Rob Percival course on udemy good for the basics of HTML and CSS.
I think there are positives and negatives, and it all comes down to personal preference.
I learned how to code, but I only learned enough to distinguish horrible code from good code. I find this extremely useful when hiring contract programmers, downloading existing packages, or purchasing packages. Personally, I have no intention of programming full-time as I think it's a waste of my time. I would get frustrated dealing with code all day, and get burnout easily.
Technically, you may not even need to code depending on your business. There are lots of software out there to help you scale up. For example, you could use something like WordPress to create a marketplace similar to Airbnb with practically no programming experience. You could then use the free time to continue focusing on gathering customers than programming.
Again, it all comes down to personal preference. I hope this helps.
Thanks, Samuel! This is a really helpful perspective.
In the same way that developers are constantly being hit up by "idea guys" to build their genius new app, I've started to attract a bit of interest from "engineering rockstars" who will code this product for the low, low price of 50% equity.
I think learning to code to distinguish bad code from good could be a happy medium between wanting to learn more about coding and focusing on what's already working (sales/growth + my cobbled together solution).
Easter European countries have a good affordable talent pool you can draw from. I've had pretty good results with them, but of course I always did my due diligence by checking references, portfolios, and giving them small jobs before the big jobs.
"I've started to attract a bit of interest from "engineering rockstars" who will code this product for the low, low price of 50% equity."
That made me chuckle. I've dealt that problem as well. I always countered those offers by offering them non-preferred common stock in a company structure resembling Alibaba. It's always great to get their opinion on Alibaba before making them the offer. It's even better when they say they own stock in Alibaba, but won't take your company stock.
If you are eager to learn how to code, than I'd recommend learning it! I learned a few years ago and have found it invaluable when it comes to launching a side project. That said, I wouldn't necessarily learn just for this project. 90% of your time is focused on growth, and I'd recommend staying focused on that. Take the time to hire a dev or remote team to build out the SaaS mvp tool. Leverage your strengths...and your most valuable asset: time.
That's just my 2 cents :)
Thanks, Tyler!
Obviously things change rapidly in the world of software development, but what was your strategy when you first decided to learn to code?
To someone coming from a sales/BD background, it's incredibly overwhelming given the glut of languages, courses, and other resources out there.
I had taken a couple of online programming courses (One Month Rails) but nothing stuck. In 2015 I decided I wanted to learn how to code beyond the free online courses and signed up for front-end web development at General Assembly. I loved it and as soon as I finished I took the back-end web development course to learn Ruby on Rails. They were part-time evening courses.
To jump into the mobile development world I took Rob Percival’s Swift class on Udemy. Having the baseline knowledge from my General Assembly courses made the online course much easier and I picked up Swift pretty quickly.
To decide what you want to do, I'd focus on what types of projects you'd want to build? It seems like your ideas are more B2B or SaaS, so I'd focus on a back-end course that covers something like Ruby on Rails, versus doing iOS.
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any questions or need some motivation.
One Month Rails was so bad that, sadly, I had to ask the One month team for a refund... Instead, I tried Code4Startup. I learned Ruby on Rails by building an Airbnb clone with relatively advanced features (Stripe Connect). I also had to read the Rails Tutorial by M. Hartl.
The best solution, in my opinion, would be to learn to code in a bootcamp such as this one:
https://www.lewagon.com/
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One Month Rails is not worth the $200 price tag. Many fundamental concepts of web applications are not properly discussed or even explained at all. The way Mattan (the instructor) teaches lacks methodology, structure, rigor and precision. All in all, the "One Month" brand is just pure marketing.
However, the "one month" concept is really clever. It makes you think that you'll acquire a relatively advanced level of understanding by sequentially learning how the important bricks (that make a web app) are working in synergy. And in only 30 days. Sounds too good to be true ? Exactly. In practice, their pedagogical approach to teaching Rails is really superficial. It is 6 hours of video spread over 30 days. And the material was severely lacking in terms of depth.
Here are the things that really bothered me:
1)Not teaching the basics of Ruby. I believe that it could lead to a lot confusion, particularly for beginners.
=>They should have taught the basics of Ruby right at the beginning. Just enough so that you don't feel lost navigating Rails and wondering what certain keywords mean.
2)The basics of the MVC pattern are introduced relatively late in this course and are not thoroughly explained.
3)Very superficial explanations regarding the data model, DB schema, one-to-many, many-to-many relationships and joint table.
=> Right before attacking Rails, they should have explained how to design a safe DataBase model and what are the basics of a DataBase (primary key, foreign key, columns etc).
4)HTTP requests are not thoroughly explained.
=> They should have shown how to dissect HTTP requests with a Chrome developer tool like Postman (so that we could understand what Header, Body, Verbs are and the difference between them etc)
5)Params in Rails are not thoroughly explained.
=> They did not explain from the beginning what params and strong params are and their importance in CSRF attacks. That is web app security 101. Wasn't worth their time apparently.
6)Active Record is not thoroughly explained.
7)The way CRUD is explained is simplistic and confusing.
8)Same thing for model validations. Not even explained.
9)The use of a scaffold generator. For me that was an unnecessary compromise: relying on rails for the heavy lifting. I believe using the magic of the scaffold generator prevent beginners like us from totally understanding the flow we should use to code a RESTful application. We also don't get to know what's really happening under the hood.
Many other things bothered me... but I'll spare you the details as this is turning into a rant.
All the problems I described above were addressed by another course I found online. Price was the same but the value provided was far superior. Instructor is a former Google software engineer. Very well structured course. Learning path was progressive and at the end, I really felt that I had acquired a solid basis of Rails.
Here is the curriculum:
1-Install Rails on you local environment
2-The basics of Ruby
3-Arrays, Hashes, Iterators
4-Object-oriented Ruby (this section was really cool - they let you make calls to the Product Hunt API)
5-The MVC design pattern
6-Work on a Tech Product (design the mockup with Sketch, imagine Users Stories, organize the project in Trello, DataBase design, 1-to-n and n-to-n relationships
Product Hunt clone project
7-MVC in Rails
8-Routing in Rails
9-Params in Rails
10-Active Record
11-CRUD with Rails
12-CRUD - new and create
13-CRUD - edit, update and destroy
14-Frontend with Rails
15-Users Stories from A to Z
16-Users and authentication
17-Deployment on Heroku
18-Image upload with cloudinary
19-Upvote feature on a Product
20-AJAX with Rails
Took me a week to complete this course plus a month to read and absorb the materials in the Rails Tutorials by M. Hartl (highly recommend this one).
As for Code4Startup: on a pure pedagogical standpoint, I would not say that the material is better than One Month. But at least, you'll learn by coding a real life project that integrates advanced features (such as Stripe Connect).
Good luck!
This comment was deleted 8 years ago