A collection of technology pitfalls I’ve seen non-technical startup founders make, and how to avoid them.
Don’t wait
This is an easy one. If you want to start a company where users all sign up to use Service X but the technology for Service X isn’t going to be ready for 1 month, you shouldn’t just spend that month sitting around and playing on Twitter.
You should go out and get the users anyway. Getting users is hard for pretty much every startup in its early days, so don’t delay doing it. Keep a spreadsheet of email addresses, write down phone numbers of everyone you meet who expresses an interest in what you’re doing, post about what you’re doing in forums and get contact details from everyone who replies.
When your technology is ready to go, you’ll have hundreds of accounts from day one, and you can avoid that empty-desert feel new sites sometimes have.
Your startup’s technology will never be finished
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step
and
Rome wasn’t build in day
but also
your startup’s technology will never be finished.
Non-technical founders can fall into a trap of seeing the technology side of a startup as a hurdle that has to be overcome. Other activities are then postponed until the technology is “finished”.
The reality is that your technology is only ever “finished for now” and it’ll need improving, updating and maintaining as you get more users and your idea grows. Technology grows as your company does, don’t find yourself waiting for technology to be finished.
Your technology doesn’t need to start perfect
Remember that the tech side of your startup can always be changed and improved. Don’t try to get everything right first time - your idea of what features are included in “perfect” will change as your startup evolves.
In six months, your concept might have changed or you might have 100x as many users as now - so your technology just needs to be good enough, not perfect. It’s a waste of time and money to make something that works for millions of users when you only have 1 thousand today.
Save your time, save your money: get the technology good enough for now and focus on getting to 1 thousand users before you think about getting to 1 million.
It’s a trap
Some startup ideas are simply traps - ideas that sound attractive and easy but are actually incredibly difficult to execute and profit from.
Fashion traps
Traps are often things that are currently fashionable. For example, dating sites. There seems to be a new one every week. I think this is because people think they know why existing dating sites are failing, and think they know how to fix them.
Even if you build the perfect dating site (and, let’s face it, you probably won’t), you then have the challenge of marketing your idea to all the users of other sites. Even if your site is perfect, you then have to communicate that to a large crowd.
You’re much more likely to succeed if you have access to a group of people whose problem isn’t being solved than if you’re trying to improve on flaws in existing solutions.
Symbiotic markets
Dating sites are also a great example of symbiotic markets. Symbiosis means living things that have evolved together and are dependent on each other for survival. Check out the Wikipedia page for some cool examples.
Symbiotic markets are business ideas where you need two distinct groups of users to make a success of the site. Auction sites like eBay need both buyers and sellers, dating sites for heterosexuals need both men and women.
If eBay had no sellers, the buyers wouldn’t visit. And if the buyers didn’t visit then the sellers wouldn’t list.
The danger of symbiotic markets is the chicken-and-egg situation where it seems impossible to get one group of users without the other. In the end neither comes. It takes double the effort to get enough users for your site to pass the tipping point in a service with symbiotic markets.
Platforms are a trap
A platform is something other businesses build on to make their own services. Famous, lucrative examples are Facebook’s platform for building Facebook-based apps and the Android and iOS platforms.
Platforms are really hard to get right. You can’t do a platform properly until you can anticipate every single facility that will be wanted by someone who builds on it. The famous platforms everyone has heard of started out by building a whole raft of apps for themselves before letting other companies try out the platform, to avoid this problem. Make several applications first THEN extract the platform from that and you stand a much better chance than if you try to build the platform on day one.
Hire a CTO or consultant you trust
An obvious point but it bears repeating. If you hire a CTO, you’re likely to be working closely with them for a long time. If you hire either a CTO or a consultant, they have the potential to either ruin your business or make it incredible.
Years ago, I joined my first startup as CTO. We were looking at changing the way clothes are recommended and bought in the fashion industry, and we had a sound business model.
But it was a terrible idea for me to be their CTO; I’m not at all enthused about fashion and was very open with them about this. I should never have asked to join, and they should never have wanted to have me. I also made clear that I wanted to have nothing to do with running the business, I just wanted to be left in isolation to make their tech.
This should have been another warning sign: be wary of separating the technology from any other part of the business. It’s vital for planning the business to know which parts of the technology are hard, expensive and slow, and which are easy, cheap and fast. Similarly, it’s vital for the technology side to be made with the future direction of the business in mind. The technology can always be changed but early decisions can make later changes easier or harder.
I left that startup after only a few months. Nowadays, I take a much stronger role in the business side of startups I work with now. Last I heard, they’d secured investment and were in a London startup accelerator programme. Hopefully they went on to find a CTO who was a better fit with what they were doing.
A good CTO / consultant will care about what you’re doing, explain how the technology affects your business, get involved in your business model, and be creative about new directions. They’ll take half the work off your hands and help you make good decisions at the same time.
A bad tech-person will just do whatever you tell them, whether or not it’s right for the business overall. This is easier in the short term but will harm you in the long term when you’ve spent all your cash on technology you didn’t need and bad technology decisions come back to bite you.