The Untechnical Founder Death Spiral
You’ve got the next great idea for a killer app, but you’re not a developer and you’ve never built a technology product before. However, you’re in luck because you have a friend who has a friend who’s a developer, and he’s willing to help you build the first version of your product. For free! Wow!
So begins the Un-Technical Founder Death Spiral.
Stage 1
What will happen next, in 99 times out of 100, is that the person who offered to help you for free will realize that (a) they don’t really have time to work on something else because they have a day job and (b) you’re not paying them, so if the choice is to do work for free or go drink beer, they’re going to go drink beer.
You can’t really ask them to knuckle down because, well, they’re working for free. So your idea sits. And sits.
You finally get so fed up that you say “Forget it! I’ll hire someone to help me!” You borrow some money or get friends and family to invest a little seed money and show up on UpWork with your project.
Welcome to Stage 2.
Stage 2
It turns out that you’ve never managed a technology project or a developer before. You don’t know how much information you need to provide to get things done the way you want. You don’t know how to hold developers accountable for deadlines. You don’t know if the work you’re getting is top-shelf or utter garbage.
You spend the next two months working with some developer from outer Mongolia because you could afford him. You get frustrated because, as it turns out, you’re not that great of a communicator and neither are they. You’re never online at the same time. You can’t get the app installed to test it.
It’s just so frustrating! Why can’t these people just do what you asked them to do?
Your $10,000 that you raised from your family goes poof. Another two months is gone. You still don’t have a product to show to prospects. The sky is getting darker. But you know, if you could only find the right company to work with, everything will work out.
You find a local software development shop, who promptly tells you that all the work from that previous guy is complete crap. You’ll have to start over. It’s going to be $100k to get your MVP done, but they’ve got a list of references that’s amazing!
You go back to the well and raise the $100k.
Welcome to Stage 3.
Stage 3
You took your lumps working with the guy from UpWork. Now you know what you’re doing. It’s all going to work this time.
Then you have your first meeting with the software development shop. They start throwing around terms like sprint, user story, customer profile, source control, deployment, unit testing. The list is endless. You’re lost. What do you need? What don’t you need?
But, these guys are pros, right? So you’ll just trust them to do things the right way.
Three months in, you hit an unexpected roadblock. Neither you nor the development shop thought of a critical problem that just surfaced. It turns out that it’s going to cost you another $50k and two months to get your MVP done.
You’re out of cash. You don’t have a product. You’ve spent $110,000 of other people’s money (and probably a good bit of your own).
You’re dead. Back to your dumb old desk job that you hate.
Avoiding the Death Spiral
If this sounds familiar to you, or you’re in one of the stages above but not yet dead, there is still an opportunity to save your idea and some of your money.
Over the next several articles we’ll cover each of the stages mentioned above and how you work your way through and out of a given stage. We’ll also be sharing some of the best presentations we’ve seen on this topic along the way so that you can learn from others who’ve gone before you and have successfully navigated the complex world of getting a technical product built.