Startup shocker: Bootstrapping for the non-geek
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The document provides guidance for non-technical individuals on how to successfully launch and maintain a startup. It emphasizes the importance of identifying personal skills, effectively communicating with technical team members, and recruiting a strong CTO early in the process. It also encourages leveraging free online resources for learning technical skills and joining communities for collaboration and support.
Startup shocker: Bootstrapping for the non-geek
- 1. STARTUP SHOCKER How to do it Even if you’re not a techie!
- 2. It can still be done.
- 3. Is this you, too?
- 4. You really need to live it, but it can be done. I am a very non-technical guy, with just a liberal arts B.A. and only a couple moderately realistic startup ideas. The following are the most worthwhile things I did which made it possible for me to get my startup going, and helped me keep it going for the last 22 months.
- 6. Okay, so you're not technical? If you haven't lived the startup life yet, you may not be aware of all the things you can begin to do and be appreciated by your engineer counterpart(s) and brilliant designer - who are glad to leave those tasks and skill development to you. List what you can do. Write it all out and add to each skill links that show how you have done these things.
- 7. What are you bringing to the table?
- 8. Show them where your talents run deep
- 9. Build humility 3.0 in yourself... ...by assessing all that you will probably never do as well as they people you will hire or partner with.
- 11. When startup people team up... ...capable programmers are the belles of the ball. Everyone has an idea; few can do much with it - such as wireframe it, let alone build a working prototype themselves.
- 12. Wireframes? I wrote (“Area”) on my partner’s early wireframes, making the key we used to iterate with.
- 13. Someone needs to be fast, fluent and inspiring with design, too. The most head-hunted when teams form is the coder. Next, the brilliant designer with fluency in full stack web design languages proficiencies (and maybe mobile development experience as well).
- 14. No one believes that the lack of a bubbly people-person idea guy is going to stymie their project. Expect to need to win over the people that you need.
- 15. Learn to speak geek Study a programming language. MOOCs like Coursera, Udacity and Udemy have free courses! Learn to communicate well with technical people.
- 16. Recruit a CTO good and early.
- 18. While you are most in need of a CTO who will be less likely to annoy your designer and programmers, you want to always to listening for people who would fill other roles well. In all of them look for the following traits...
- 22. If they shy away from any of these requests... ...you had better accept that your search for someone to fill a role is not over.
- 26. We thought we nailed it with this iteration.
- 27. nope. Not even close, it turned out.
- 31. For a little free help starting up… Find me in G+, we’ll video call. (I’m a talker, not a typer.) To pitch a startup idea and build a team worldwide, make it CLEARLY original and launch it through http://ideaswatch.com Once live in IW, bring it into the Startup Bootstrappers Google+ Community (find us and apply from personal account, not brand page, please)
- 32. So who am I? I design social media tools that benefit publicists, marketing people and anyone aiming to reach more people, relevantly. I initiate and also join projects worldwide, bringing them the benefit of my experience in product and service design, user experience, PR, business modelling and startup project management. I live in G+, talk with me in a video call: https://plus.google. com/u/0/+SaulFleischman/about/p/pub