Hard Won Advice from Founders About How to Build and Lead a Tech Team
Building your first product as a nontechnical founder can be daunting. Where do you start? How do you know it’s good enough?
We spent some time asking founders what really matters at this point in the game, when you’re just starting to build your tech and team and summarized their advice for you.
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The failure of most tech companies isn't their ability to build tech. That's not actually why they struggle. It's their inability to actually build the rest of the company around the tech.
Chris Dornfeld, President and Co-founder at Whistle Systems
The investment in time to figure out the product strategy and how that contributes to revenue is the only thing you should be focusing on when building an MVP.
Lisa Bubes, Founder and CEO of Garmentier
My CTO basically said, look, it's never going to be perfect. Tech will always be changing. It's never going to be perfect. And so you’ve got to get over that.
Angela Caine, Co-Founder & COO of WineView
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A Excerpt From Tech Founders on Startup Success
Listen to Your Customers
Nothing changes your product more than talking to users.
Tatiana Alexa, Founder and CEO of Sangrove
Once you have found customers that you can solve a problem for, your product will help you solve their problem 100x faster. Your ability to prioritize your product roadmap will become so much easier if you have real, paying customers who are asking for a solution.
The philosophy has been, the customer says it, that's what gets prioritized. When the customer asks for something that's straight up, that's it. We drop everything. That's the direction we're going.
Jose Quiros, Co-Founder & CEO of F3TCH, Inc.
You have to detach yourself from the idea that you know 100 percent what needs to be in your product or not. You have got to talk to potential customers, and you have to talk to a lot of them.
Lisa Bubes, Founder and CEO of Garmentier
Many founders spoke about MVPs that didn’t land with customers, or tech teams who couldn’t build what customers were looking for. Being able to translate from your customers to your development team and back is a learned skill set. To practice it, though, you have to have a customer base to talk to.
If our people aren't happy and aren't using this tool to do their job, then we haven't done our job. That's going to be the primary driver for how we shape and grow this company.
Rachael Jones, CEO & Co-Founder, Syntax Health
Founder after founder commented that once their product was in the market, a lot of the roadmap focus was driven by customer feedback. And they wish they had started getting that feedback sooner so they could have gotten on track sooner. That doesn’t mean every word of feedback needs to become a to-do, but when feedback aligns with core business strategy that solidifies where to double down efforts and how to prioritize your product roadmap.
When you first start your business, it is easy to stay connected with customers because your base is small. As that base expands and both your team and customer base grow, it can become more difficult to stay connected. This is why establishing a system for collecting and integrating customer feedback is important from day one. Scale your system as you scale your company.
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It gets harder to stay connected to the customers as you grow. Find ways to stay focused on the customer.
Brian Regienczuk, CEO and Founder of Agency Spotter