Programmers don't understand Software
Software Engineers should make the best software startup founders in theory. They’re smart, driven, and creative. They can build the entire business's infrastructure with their bare hands.
But there’s a distinct problem with their traits when it comes to building a real business.
They’ve been focused on coding for many years, so it’s difficult for them to get out of what they have ingrained in their minds.
Often perfectionistic, they resist talking to customers and co-creating it alongside them. They actually need to talk to customers and interact with customers on a very manual level first before they ever think about the product. Yet the longer they develop the product, the further they seem to get from that. I’ve been through this myself, so I get what it’s like to be so heads down on a product that talking to a customer will set you back. And maybe it will, but that’s a good thing.
There seems to be a playbook floating around that lays out the process of building a software engineering company, something like this:
Assemble the technical team and the CEO
Identify the market, do zero real customer research, or do it with leading questions or family and friends.
Analyze competitors for the pitch deck
Prototype product
Build MVP
Get stuck in massive feature bloat and fear of releasing
Eventually release product to “alpha testers.”
Promote to “beta testers” to get “feedback.”
Beta and Alpha Testers say go
Finally, release the product to the crickets
Attempt to get investment through accelerators or pitch competitions
Fail due to no traction
Finally, start to try onboarding customers 1:1 and realize the entire product is bloated and useless.
Give up or start actually solving customers’ problems manually
This could all be accomplished in three steps
Define an ICP and a hypothesis
Validate the hypothesis by trying to sell a manually delivered solution
Build the simplest version of the product that solves the problem and iterate
This is how all great companies were made. This is common knowledge, so why don’t people do it then? Well, the answer is not rational. It’s fear. Fear of being seen. Fear of looking silly. Fear of doing something imperfectly. The irony is that spending years building a product for no one is much more embarrassing than releasing something imperfect and iterating.
It’s just that no one tells you that to your face.
If you're six months into building something nobody's asked for, let’s chat