Founders also underestimate the degree to which good technologists who’ve worked at several startups also understand the business.
I’ve watched friends who are CTOs get in to the same conflicts over and over with founders and product owners.
The founders and product owners throw out 10 different ideas and push small dev teams to execute on all of them. There’s no focus or strategy, it’s just throwing ideas against the wall.
Expensive-to-maintain ideas with no uptake are held on too for way too long.
Expensive-to-create but sexy ideas are prioritised over cheap-to-create ideas with obvious potential for customer retention or up-sell.
CTOs are often the ones taking about disciplined experimentation to find product/market fit against head-in-the-clouds founders with a vague, uncommunicated vision.
I repeatedly see founders ignoring solid advice until, if they’re lucky, experienced boards say the same things as the ignored CTO.
So often founders seem to think they’re a fictionalised version Steve Jobs, not understanding that Apple’s success was as much down to gritty, detailed engineering as a single visionary. And of course not understanding that they themselves are usually not visionary geniuses.
These impressions are from a small sample of maybe 10 CTOs, but some of them had the same experience at consecutive startups before learning how to screen companies better.
We need more founders who care about the unglamorous nuts and bolts. Or at least value the people who do.
Would you say this is true even if you are not interested in scaling fast and are okay with a slower "organic" growth?
(For context I have a few ideas I'd like to make a startup out of eventually, and I'm okay bootstrapping to a low/mid-volume high-niche area. I don't intend for the startup to really have massive profits, as long as I can keep it net profit and carve out a name in the niche I'll be happy.)
Unless your startup is intended to be more of a boutique consultancy and not some kind of SaaS.
If you're shopping for a high performance $10,000 oscilloscope or 3000 high endurance SD cards a month for the next 12 months, or a point-of-sales system for your small business?
Then the suppliers will have a sales person who'll visit you, demonstrate the oscilloscope's features, offer to loan it to you for a month or two so you can try it out, chase up answers to technical questions ('Can I install antivirus software on this oscilloscope?'), and suchlike.
If you're selling into an industry where that's the norm, you're probably going to need someone who knows how to do it :)
Those are the unsung details that you notice when they're gone but are easy to take for granted.
For me at least that is some of the secret sauce of Apple...
Smartphones weren't a new idea, but Apple got to work and made them better.
On that note, I was really curious as to see what Apple would do with cars, but I don't think there was enough they could do that was different or better enough compared to the huge amount of competition all trying to do the same thing. Tesla was the closest we'll get to an Apple car (car company ran like a software company), and they couldn't even do mechanical engineering properly (car body, welding, etc).
Steve Jobs never tried to make me pay $8,000 extra for a feature that doesn’t exist yet but is just around the corner and will be totally amazing. Elon Musk convinced me to hand over that money, and five years later the feature still does nothing.
Jobs fundamentally wasn’t a liar. When I bought Mac OS X 10.0, it was rough and slow, but it did what was advertised and I was excited to remain an Apple customer to see this platform evolve. Musk sold me a steaming pile of vaporware, making me feel stupid rather than excited, and I don’t want to remain a Tesla customer.
I didn’t want an iPhone, so I looked at the other stuff in stock at the cell phone stores.
I couldn’t figure out how to use the web browser on any of the display models. I ended up switching back to a nokia candybar phone until android came out.
In hindsight, one of the native linux nokia phones would have been nice, but they ran a similar OS as openmoko, and I was frustrated with that software stack’s lack of focus on being a daily driver.
Even the original iPhone touch keyboard was terrible compared to the hardware keyboards on BlackBerry devices. But consumers were willing to tolerate the keyboard because the iPhone was so much better in other ways.
Even after capacitance won, the iPhone keyboard was still snappier. I think they do some smoothing of the touch contact to infer from the glancing of the contact what you might have meant. Eg where did you keydown vs keyup.
If you've ever used one of those in-app banking "security" keyboards you might notice what a keyboard with no smoothing feels like.
It wasn't until SwiftKey that Apple even had to worry about competition
Or the Palm Pilot, which had a special 'graffiti' alphabet for handwriting recognition.
CEO = Sales and funding, maybe product owner very early days but quickly handing off to experienced product folks as soon as too painful to continue with rest of workload.
(n=1 from my experience at a hyper growth startup)
Pick something that already makes money and do it slightly better. Idea not needed (other than "do it slightly better" which IMO is much more in the "how to run a business" camp than the "ideas person" camp). Forgive the ideological soapbox/tangent but this is really what capitalism is all about. You find a way to do something slightly better, faster cheaper - maybe all three - and you can have a successful business.
Another angle is to build software for a non-software industry you happen to be involved in, or that family or friends are at. Unfortunately for a lot of developers, IT is their corner already so there's a lot of startups that make tools for developers, which is a heavily competitive space.
Other industries have a set of software they already use; CRM, inventory management, point-of-sale, websites / webshops, customer support, etc.
One interesting niche that isn't actually a niche was telecom, the soft- and hardware running the mobile network. Very invisible to a lot of developers, but I think it's ripe for disruption as it's currently dominated by old companies like Nokia, Ericcson and Oracle. The company I worked for had an idea, but were IMO still too old-fashioned and not eager enough - happy with slow and steady growth, etc. That said, they were using mid- to late 2000's tech for their front-end and C for back-end, surely there's ways to improve on that. I made an attempt but I didn't get enough support / people from the company itself, so after 2.5 years of trying to build a new configuration system which was the USP of their business on my own I called it quits. The size and complexity of that was more than I've ever worked on, and that was usually in teams of 6-10 people, if not multiple teams.
Indeed. It's been said that it's impossible to lose money selling software maintenance contracts. Or start a company that builds websites: you don't need an idea at all, the customers bring you their ideas, you just implement them. Ka-ching! Oh, and by the way Sir, you'll be needing a maintenance contract...
For me, Sales is much more difficult than coding. I had sales training that was reputed to be the best in the industry; I wasn't made for sales, and switched to support as soon as I'd completed the sales training. I like working with salesmen; I understand the game; but I can't play it.
The problem is just that a sufficiently mature product has been battle tested already, so it’s difficult at the beginning.
More importantly, most businesses don't need an "ideas person". They need someone who knows how to run a business. You need a total of one decent idea to start and run a business. You need tens of thousands of little hard choices, emails, and sales calls to keep the business successful, and that means getting your hands dirty. Ideas are not valuable.