
Traits of successful non-technical solo founders - sandimac
http://quibb.com/links/four-traits-of-successful-non-technical-solo-founders
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jonnathanson
This is a good article, but one thing just kind of bugs me:

 _"Non-technical solo founders need to be extremely product focused. They're
not purely business-y or marketing types"_

Marketing gets short shrift in the tech world, probably because tech is one of
the major industries in which the marketing function and the product
development function are separated to a large degree. But true marketing, as a
discipline, is very much product focused.

In fact, the discipline is often said to encompass "Four P's": product, price,
place, and promotion. Many people -- not just in the tech world, to be fair --
tend to conflate the "promotion" function (advertising, communications,
messaging) with marketing in general. In fact, promotion is just a subset of
marketing. It's an important subset, but it's a subset nonetheless.

The best marketers are well grounded in, and can draw upon, the full-spectrum
marketing skill set. Finding one of these marketers can actually be very
valuable to your company. Having this full skill set can be very valuable to
_you_ , whether you're a technical or non-technical founder.

[A (hopefully) interesting side note:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix>]

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itsprofitbaron
FWIW there are actually 7 P's in marketing: Product, Price, Promoton, Place,
Packaging, Positioning & People.

However, I do agree with you that people often consider promotion = marketing
when promotion ≠ marketing; its just one aspect of it and embracing all
aspects of the marketing mix is beneficial to any company.

~~~
AlexBlom
The 4 and 7 has been an ongoing debate among marketing academics, it seems. I
recall the "right" answer alternating course by course through school, pending
the professors interest.

If I recall, the 4 P's are the standard marketing mix, with the 7 P's being
called the extended marketing mix. FWIW, the 4 was definitely more central at
my school.

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mirsadm
Is anybody else tired of reading x traits/qualities required to perform y and
z? Seems like every other post is highlighting what you need to have to
achieve everything you can ever want. It's like a bad collection of extracts
from self-help books.

~~~
Caligula
More like it is blog spam to drive traffic to the bloggers startup/blog/etc..

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davidjohnstone
I wish the title here was the same as the article's title, "Four traits of
successful non-technical solo founders". I got half-way through the article
before I realised that it was only talking about non-technical solo founders,
and it made a lot more sense.

That said, it does sound perfectly reasonable that non-technical solo founders
should be product focussed (like somebody in any startup needs to be), have
the means and connections to get technical help, and have some understanding
of what the people building the product are actually doing.

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zachalexander
What does "non-technical" mean, really?

I always wonder what someone means by it, because I may well (once done with
my current project) decide to start a startup as a solo founder. And I'm
"aspiringly-technical," let's say. I studied math in college, but only started
programming more recently.

This article was reassuring, in a sense, because at the very least I qualify
as a "technically-literate non-technical person." But I'd like to be more than
just technically literate.

~~~
snowwrestler
If you build the product yourself (write the code yourself), you are a
technical founder.

If you don't write the code yourself, you will need to partner with or hire
someone who can. That would make you a nontechnical founder.

To use a famous example, Woz was the technical founder, while Steve Jobs and
Ronald Wayne were nontechnical founders.

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WadeF
One other thing I might add is to make sure your product isn't overly
technical. Non-technical solo founders can do great if they are building
mostly crud based applications.

As soon as the idea advances to include sophisticated technical elements it's
nearly impossible for a solo non-technical founder to run the business without
a competent technical co-founder.

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yuhong
I am thinking of comparing this with non-technical big company CEOs, including
MBAs.

