If you are starting up or scaling up a technology business, you will one of three types of people – and depending on which YOU are will give you a steer on how to go about dealing with the challenges you’ll face.
They are:
1 – the non-technology commercial leader who sees an opportunity and goes there own way,
2 – the non-technology “passionista” who wants to share their vision,
3 – the technologist entrepreneur.
The non-technology commercial leader is someone who’s worked for 20-25 years in an industry and knows it like the back of their hands. (I’m not sure if you’ve seen that post going around on social media on how the CEO of Pret started as assistant manager of a Pret!)
So this could be someone who works for a courier company who looks at how people deliver parcels and thinks – let’s do this with drones – and leaves to startup a drone delivery business.
The advantage this sort of person has is that the commercial domain that they want to build their business is in is in their blood. They fully understand the offer they’re trying to take to the market, and most likely being senior with an organisation they’ve helped to build are well placed to take that experience out to build their own thing.
The disadvantage this sort of person faces is that oftentimes they’re used to having the support of a scaled up business, and on their own, they’re… on their own.
The non-technology passionista has a creative vision and genuine attachment to the product they want to bring to the market. Maybe they love dining in the finest restaurants in London and wants to make that more discoverable or accessible. Or maybe they once a family member had their car stolen and wants to build a car tracking solution to prevent domestic vehicle thefts.
The advantage this sort of person has is a genuine affection for the domain they’re looking to build their solution in, and because of that they’re likely to find product-market fit comes quite easy.
The disadvantage this sort of person faces is that the weird little anarchic, anachronistic rules in whatever domain their working that’s new to them commercial could come up and bite them.
The technology person has, counterintuitively, in my experience the highest mountain to climb and the most challenges to face. Building a business is just that – it’s building a business, and it’s a commercial endeavour.
Technology people who see a gap in a market and then try to plug it have a bit of a tendency to over-focus on the actual technical part of the solution and struggle with understanding the actual commercial business bit.
In my experience, the people who do best at starting and scaling technology businesses are those who’ve made a career in the domain and want to do a sidewise move.
They take that deep, innate understanding of how the industry works – how people talk, how people are motivated, and how they want to be transformed, and then use that to build really decent businesses.
Second are the people who follow a passion – they’ve got a great chance of knowing how to “speak to their customers where they are and create something compelling”, but can get stung but not having that deep understanding of the industry they’re operating in.
Both these types of customers though are challenged by the fact that they do need to build a software product because they are creating a technology business.
But, honestly, in a parallel universe where there’s a version of me who doesn’t write to code, I’d want to be a non-technology person starting a business. You’ve got a better change of success doing it that way round.