🤓 i don't speak tech... what do i do
As a non technical founder, taking your precious idea and bringing it to fruition is challenging. You need someone who can interact with a computer because... you can't. The realization of your small spark rests on your technical co founder's shoulders and your ability to effectively communicate with them in order to gather kindling and produce a small fire, a hope that can be best personified as a happy, paying customer in the not so distant future.
This last communication bit is not easy if you have never worked in technology, or like me, have worked in the logistics industry your entire adult life. But, what separates me from the sea of the technologically unenlightened masses is that I have crossed the border into entrepreneurship and, finding myself on the other side, have reasonably decided to surround myself with a new kind of man previously unknown to me: the full stack developer. Thank God for them.
Without my co founding developers, I would be completely stuck in the mud, fumbling between layers of sediment, left to ponder if my idea could ever be of use to anyone. After sharing my vision, my dream of how we could transform an industry and introduce an entirely new vertical of technology to our target market, they decided to join me in this endeavor, full time. Six months later, we released version 1.0 of our product, and we're off to the venture capital races at inflated valuations after securing strong initial traction.
Oh wait... it's not that simple. You have to be able to talk to them. You have to collaborate, communicate, and perspirate with your team every single day. You have to overcome your dreadfully lacking knowledge of technology and understand what it takes to actually build the product in their eyes. How?
The problem is I don't know. I don't know how much progress we're making day to day because as soon as I ask, everything they say flies over my head, and I'm left saying: "Ok, sounds good. I really appreciate all of the hard work you guys are doing. Please let me know if I can support you in any way."
Gross.
Fortunately, there is light at the end of this tunnel. My co founders recommend I learn Git, so I can view, test and, maybe one day, contribute to our code. I found a course on Codecademy to learn Git and, after signing up for a pro account, I think this will be a very useful tool for me in the future. I'm curious to hear other non technical founders experiences with contribution in the early stages of their startup. Let me know below!
Also, this is my link to Codecademy where you can get a free month of Pro.
Use this link: http://ssqt.co/mcgOKOO
We have gone through similar situations and the best option is to add a Product Owner who is the mediator between the backlog of the technical team and you as a visionary and business leader.
The Product Owner will know how to build the backlog to the technical team based on what works close to you and then he can turn everything over to the technical team for close follow-up.
Learn GIT will unfortunately not be useful to you. Before that, I'd be looking to learn more about agile development methodologies like SCRUM, so you can get closer to the technical team and visualize where they are in development.
Regards!
You need to move the conversation from code to common ground. Could try Agile development (where a "backlog" of tasks is maintained & work is progressed in "sprints"). Monitor progress by sprints completed, backlog burn through, etc. Or get someone else to fill that role.
Sounds like you need a technical co-founder that can share your vision and take full ownership of the tech (+product) side.
That person will be the mediator between your vision and implementation.
p.s Learning git will not help you in any way
Two options:
Probably the combination is the best. 2 is necessary if you have a technical product. As the founder of a technical product, you have to understand what it takes to build the productd, how it works, etc.
However, you will not learn it from today to tomorrow. Git won't solve your problems and that your co-founded recommended this solutions really shows that they are deep on the technical part. But you need to glue the business and technical part together, and this is where product management comes in. You need to setup workflows if you haven't yet, you might work in sprints, track your progress, estimate in story points, calculate your team velocity and create burndown charts. You probably will not be able to do this now.
So my advice would be, get a product manager who knows to do that, and learn in parallel by yourself and from your product manager.
Honestly learning git probably won't help you understand much IMHO, also you can just see the stuff over web UI if they use github for example...
The only thing that might be useful is if you have multiple things worked on in parallel that are visual, you might test different versions without bugging them much to setup an infrastructure for you to access it, but that might be done with learning 1 or 2 commands.
As non technical you still have the ability to be the Marketing/outreach person talking to potential customer which technical people usually hate, you can contribute in research if relevant or later on in testing and project management.. aligning the team to agile and lean methodologies and pushing them to prioritise things you can test might come super handy in multiple fronts, creating the collaboration system between yourselves, and your testing would be appreciated even if not immediately.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago