Advice for Technical and Non-Technical Founders

A founder's background significantly influences their natural tendencies and blind spots. Both technical and non-technical founders need to be self-aware and deliberately work to overcome their inherent biases to build a successful company.

Advice for Technical Founders:

Your Goal is to Stop Coding: While your technical skills are essential to build the initial product, your primary long-term role as a founder is not to be the lead developer. You must transition from a "Maker's Schedule" (long, uninterrupted blocks of deep work) to a "Manager's Schedule" (days broken into small increments for meetings and context-switching).
Learn Marketing and Sales: Your natural tendency will be to solve every business problem by writing more code. This is a trap. Revenue plateaus and high churn are rarely solved by adding more features. You must force yourself to learn the fundamentals of marketing and sales to understand the real drivers of growth.
Hire Developers to Replace Yourself: Your first hires should be developers who can take over the day-to-day coding, freeing you up to focus on the business-critical tasks that only a founder can do.

Advice for Non-Technical Founders:

You Are in the Minority: 90% of bootstrapped SaaS companies have at least one technical founder. Building a SaaS product without a technical co-founder is extremely difficult and capital-intensive.
Your First Hire Must Be a Trusted Developer: Finding a senior, trustworthy developer is your single most important task. This person is effectively a co-founder, as their technical decisions will have a massive, long-term impact on your company.
Beware of Being Misled: Without a technical background, it is very difficult to evaluate a developer's skill or the quality of their work. This makes you vulnerable to being overcharged or having a poor-quality product built. If possible, find a technical co-founder or a highly-vetted, senior developer you can trust implicitly.

Tags: #SaaS #founder #hiring #team-building #technical-founder #non-technical-founder #mindset