Magnus Grimeland
Coding is the new literacy — for years, people have been calling programming the X-factor that guarantees future success.
It’s no surprise there is a widespread perception in the startup world that anyone who doesn’t know how to code should forget about trying to create anything. After all, Silicon Valley, which historically has been to software engineering what Hollywood is to acting, built its reputation as the birthplace of world-changing tech companies.
But the reality is that great talent is everywhere, and technical talent is not the only kind that matters. Silicon Valley is by no means the only booming tech hub in the world — in 2013, only 37 cities were home to a unicorn; by 2021, there were unicorns in a whopping 170 cities.
Having a technical background is not a requirement for a founder to build a great company, regardless of where they might be located. We work with plenty of technical and non-technical people, and we encourage founders with non-technical backgrounds to take the plunge into entrepreneurship.
Why do we feel so strongly about this?
The proof is in the data. In his book “Super Founders,” venture capitalist Ali Tamaseb gathered 30,000 data points that revealed founding CEOs of unicorns were split down the middle: Half came from a business background; half had a technical background.
And, there have been many non-technical founders who have built huge tech companies, such as Melanie Perkins of Canva, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble, and Evan Sharp of Pinterest.
If we meet an applicant who doesn’t have a technical background but brings drive, grit and some other specialized knowledge, we will almost always want to partner with them, connect them to our ecosystem and jump-start their entrepreneurial journey.
While this might sound encouraging, it doesn’t change the fact that every company needs to go to market with an MVP. Without coding skills, how do you build one?
You should always try to have at least one technical co-founder on your team. It simply makes for faster building and iterating, easier pivoting, consistency throughout the product lifetime and fewer headaches or incompatibilities down the line.
While we don’t recommend launching a company solo, if you haven’t found a technical co-founder or freelancer to build your MVP, here are four principles that will help in the meantime.
Principle 1: Non-technical is OK; non-product is not
People often confuse technical knowledge for product knowledge, but they are not the same. Each requires different educational backgrounds, team structures, focus areas within the enterprise and the types of questions that need to be asked.
Product knowledge is about being able to articulate what your thing does at the most basic level. Even if you have no clue how the technology actually works, you should be able to explain what the function is in a clear and concise way. On the other hand, technical knowledge is about building the thing itself.
If you were to put each step and its requisite knowledge on a timeline, technical knowledge comes after the product.
Product is foundational. Every startup needs someone in the project manager role to describe the vision, itemize the features the product should have, write out the roadmap and lead the iterative process — from validation and conducting market analysis to testing the product and making improvements to it.
Many founders or CEOs of famous companies came from product management roles: Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, Stewart Butterfield of Slack, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google, to name a few.
In other words, you can be a completely non-technical founder, but you can’t be a completely non-product founder. You must understand your product, through and through, and be able to answer three simple questions:
- What’s the problem?
- What’s the solution?
- How will the customer use the solution?
Principle 2: KYC
To be a successful founder, it’s essential that you know your customer. You must intimately understand your audiences, and define user profiles or personas based on demographics, motivations, and needs or pain points.
Of course, it’s always best when you are your own user. But even if you are and feel you intuitively understand your potential customers, it’s worth investing time and energy in describing audiences in a more disciplined, structured manner.
A great way to do this is through empathy maps, which put you in the shoes of your users. Equally useful are journey maps, which help you visualize the sequence of actions users take, the friction they face and the decisions they make along the way.
There are several no-code tools that you can try for both approaches:
- For empathy maps: Miro and Mural are great and easy to use, merging whiteboard sticky notes with virtual conferencing and templates.
- For journey maps: Figma and Airtable have libraries of templates you can load. They even allow you to input and pull in customer data to capture audience personas and feedback.
Principle 3: Make the sale
Aspiring founders often approach validation like those 2 a.m. conversations many of us had in college. We would say things like, “I have a startup idea … what do you think of it?” or “Have you ever thought how cool it would be if you could … ?”
These open-ended conversations end up being inefficient and less helpful than they could be, because it’s hard to separate the personal relationship from the actual quality of the product or service.
A much better approach is to just pitch it. Get to the point and sell your product or service as if the person you’re talking to could, and should, buy it on the spot.
If you can take yourself out of the equation and have the other person evaluate what you’re offering purely in business terms, you’ll get a much better sense of where you stand in terms of product-market fit.
There are many ways to validate types of MVPs. For example, Tim Ferriss tested different book titles with Facebook ads, which Harvard Business Review analyzed in a fascinating case study. Whichever approach you pick, make sure it’s about selling.
This will lead to two possible outcomes, both of which are wins:
- You win them over, or they sign an MOU, which means you’ve pre-sold. When you do get your product up and running, you have a ready customer.
- You don’t win them over, but they scrutinize your product like any customer would, giving you a better understanding of what changes to make to your MVP.
Principle 4: Just get it done
Viewing the process of validating your MVP through the lens of sales has another implication: Do it ASAP.
Leave perfectionism at the door. Ask yourself what the bare necessities are — the core features of the product — that the MVP needs to communicate. This is exactly what the founders of Dropbox did.
Since you’re not building the MVP yourself, or having a co-founder or freelancer build it for you, you’ll need to rely on no-code tools. Remember, no-code could even include writing it out on a piece of paper or putting together an old-fashioned slide deck.
But today we have sophisticated no-code solutions for different kinds of companies. Here are some good ones:
- If you’re building a landing page, check out Unicorn Platform.
- If you’re building a workflow, check out Zapier.
- If you’re building something for mobile, check out Glide.
The point is: You don’t have to build the software yourself to have a good MVP. There are plenty of ways to be creative.
Coding is a new literacy, not the new literacy, and is only one of many ways to achieve great outcomes. Successful companies need people who are great at product, operations, marketing and seeing how these pieces are orchestrated to create a harmonic symphony.
If you’re a non-technical founder with a big vision, don’t be deterred. Keep these four principles in mind and start building.
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