Developers Biggest Problems
As an online marketer since 2001 I have my own set of problems. I am really interested to know what the issues of Developers are who are trying to make money from a business rather than selling your services by the hour.
As an online marketer since 2001 I have my own set of problems. I am really interested to know what the issues of Developers are who are trying to make money from a business rather than selling your services by the hour.
Based on my own biased observations being a developer and with many startups...:
This is common
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/need-advice-always-feel-like-i-need-to-make-fix-a-feature-before-inviting-users-70bc00fe47
This is pretty spot on. The answer is that you cannot think like an average developer. What works best for me is avoiding that trap and focusing on coding to solve problems. Not being so attached to the title developer.
Some of the other comments describe the problems much better than I can but here is my personal take:
I used to believe that my development skills served as an advantage in the startup realm. After many years of building apps that "I" thought were amazing but had no traction I realized I lacked some of the most critical skills. Marketing, idea validation, market analysis, networking are all things that don't come second nature and changing my mindset is really hard. Even though I know I have to operate differently I manage to fall back to the safe area of "building until customers can't help themselves but use it".
Ultimately the biggest challenge I have faced is how to overcome that. How to suppress those interests and skills and become more pragmatic. Sure books like lean startup help but it requires discipline to apply these concepts (something probably not specific to just developers)
One particular issue I am having is building a network of influence. Creating relationships is difficult especially when the depth of my expertise is technical and doesn't lend itself well to conversations that are not technical. Social networks are a real challenge for me in the sense it's hard to contribute to conversations + small talk doesn't come naturally either. Sure I can talk to other developers but my goal is to reach out of that comfort zone..
I'm optimistic.. but change is tricky.
Great question!
The biggest problem is to find the right problem to solve and therefore finding an early customer base. I think one of the reasons is that developers aren’t exposed to enough of the right frustrations of the world. Especially developers who never worked in a large organization tend not to focus on the problems that these organizations have. I know from experience how frustrating working with large orgs can be. On the other hand, identifying and solving even a little boring problem for these categories can create a level of reward which is much harder to achieve with 10 USD / month commodity-like services.
ego ;)
Not being able to show amazing websites you've built due to NDA