The Technical Seat
Save Yourself One
Building Software is a process of infinite twists and turns. Building a landing page with WordPress, Wix, or an AI tool like Lovable might give one the impression that there’s a simple step-by-step process to follow.
A common feature is to paste your domain into a box, and the platform will perform some magic to replace its branded domain. There’s a fairly predictable set of steps to make that happen. But it’s beyond most people, so the platform has automated the process. There are literally millions of other tasks in software that are too complex or too little used to make it easy for the customer.
Investors know this. They understand a long-term software business can’t be built by a salesperson using vibe coding tools. They know that a killer pitch deck does not constitute an excellent execution. They have enough experience to know that the smoothest talkers will not necessarily build the best software.
Suppose they see someone who can confidently and assuredly speak to the technical implementation. Someone who will correct themselves as they’re talking because they’re genuinely working through the problem in their head. They care about being correct in case it damages their reputation in future. Someone who will look at a plan for a note-taking app, for example:
“We need a mobile app”
And say.
“We don’t, we need to build a minimal webapp because this is a better experience on desktop anyway, and that’s going to be much faster to get off the ground. Plus, we don’t need to worry about hiring specialized expensive Mobile Engineers and Apple’s Stringent App Store Review Process”
A simple sentence like that can direct a company from months or years of wasted effort to quickly getting off the ground and generating revenue.
There are more specialised examples than this. For example:
“We need to deploy our app on AWS”
Either:
“Yes, that sounds like a good plan, but let me do some cost estimation to make sure we’re not picking unnecessarily complex and expensive for our needs”
or
“No. We can deploy on Heroku for $5/month. The traffic we expect from this app to start doesn’t warrant that infrastructure level. We can get started for a fraction of the cost and effort, and any Engineer can figure out Heroku”
Just because something is a buzzword doesn’t mean it’s the right course of action.
Every situation is different.
Experienced people don’t reach for the shiny tool; they go for the correct tool.