Why Being a CEO/Founder with Technical Skills Can Hinder Your Startup

A Critical Look at How Technical Skills Can Become a Roadblock.

In the fast-paced world of startups, we've always heard the advice that having a CEO or founder with technical skills is an undeniable advantage. However, allow me to question this widely accepted notion and offer you a different perspective: being a CEO or founder with strong technical skills can actually be a factor that contributes to the failure of your startup.

When I embarked on my journey with Newsreadeck, my goal was clear: to create something I was passionate about while acquiring new knowledge. Given my background as a developer with years of experience in the mobile industry, I naturally gravitated toward building an app for Apple platforms, particularly iOS. However, here is where the story gets complicated. My previous experience was in backend development with expertise in PHP, and while I wanted to learn something new, I dove into the study of Swift Vapor framework.

I began rediscovering how to build a minimum viable backend to make the app work. As I progressed in my studies and coding, I also started planning the app's design.

Recognizing my limitations in design, I sought external help, which allowed me to focus on the backend while the design took shape, at least on paper.

Despite all that I learned and improved, it took me six long months to start working on the actual app. Building the backend on my own became a task that consumed much more time than I had anticipated, compared to design, where I simply provided guidelines and examples before defining the details.

Nearly a year after conceiving the idea, I finally launched the MVP of Newsreadeck.

However, this entire experience leads me to an unexpected conclusion: being a developer, instead of speeding up my project, significantly slowed it down.

If I had embarked on this venture with a co-founder who handled the technical side, or alternatively, had hired someone part-time for design, I am confident that the app would have had better features (which are currently in development), and the development timeline would have been significantly shorter.

This is not exclusive to startups. Imagine, for a moment, a restaurant where one of the owners is a former chef. If the chef encounters a problem and there is no one available to replace them, the owner, with their culinary expertise, will step in to resolve the situation. This inevitably delays the search for a new chef, as the owner believes they can keep the restaurant running. In contrast, if none of the partners had culinary skills, the problem could be resolved more quickly by seeking external help.

In a startup, everyone takes on multiple roles, but that doesn't mean it's the most effective strategy. The best thing you can do to help your startup is to recognize your limitations and allow others to support you if possible. Ultimately, you must prioritize tasks according to what you can efficiently and effectively accomplish.

This doesn't mean that learning new skills and improving your background is off the table; in fact, this can make you a more well-rounded entrepreneur. However, in the world of startups, time is a precious and limited resource, so making agile decisions and being willing to change course when necessary is crucial.