The Code is your Enemy

Summiz Holo

Challenges Faced by Builders in Startups

• You’re a builder, and while this is great for startups, it also creates a natural weakness.
• The love of creation leads to focusing on coding rather than selling, which is often not beneficial for the startup.
• Most startups fail despite excellent coding and/or design skills due to factors unrelated to code quality.
• Customers don’t make purchasing decisions based on code functionality or design aesthetics; other factors are more important.
• Necessary skills for web-based startups (coding and design) are insufficient; other valuable activities lie outside the builder's comfort zone.

Customer Interview Insights

• Have you talked to 50 potential customers? By that I mean fifty, not a dozen.
• Accidental bias can affect the validity of customer interviews.
• It’s harder to locate customers after building a product, which can waste time.
• Vet the price and ensure customers are willing to buy during interviews.
• Are people coming to your website every day? If not, solving that is much harder and much more outside your control than building software.
• You should prioritize getting attention and market validation over just coding.
• In a business context, attention, marketing, positioning, and selling are high-risk and inadequately understood compared to coding and design.
• Force yourself out of your comfort zone; focus more on the non-coding aspects that create a valuable business.