The 7 Mistakes Developers Make Starting Their First Business (and How to Avoid Them) - Emma Fletcher

My notes from Emma's presentation at CF Summit 2022

Mistakes teach you things.
Mistakes are ok.

1. Fear of Failure
super common with many things in life
people will think this is stupid, buggy, etc.
You will fail, and that's ok
Symptoms of this: cover it up, waiting for the perfect idea, etc.
Just needs "one more feature"
- 6 or 12 months down the road, they still haven't launched
There is never going to be a perfect idea -- they ALL have problems
Challenge yourself: is that REALLY why I'm waiting?

What works: committing to a Launch Date
pick that date, tell your friends so you're held accountable

2. Shiny Objet Syndrome
devs are prone to this
always looking for the latest greatest framework
once you learn this framework, you'll launch and get a million users
Your customers don't CARE what you build it with, they want you to solve a problem
On top of that, you'll lose time / energy learning the new framework you've never used before, for something that isn't going to move the business forward
You're probably going to throw out version 1 anyway.
so don't worry about how you build it
If you get the million users, you'll have the funds to hire a team to build the best app ever.

3. Overengineering

See this a lot in daily life as a developer
Don't NEED to support a million users on day 1 - you need to solve a problem on day 1, that's it.
Focus on the bare minimum, it's ok if it's clunky
consider using simple or manual tasks
Don't build everything from scratch.
Devs love to build their own solutions for their own use cases
Somebody has likely solved the problem for you already, use that solution.
Use someone else's library / tool, even if it's not perfect, get customers coming in...then from there if you NEED TO, rebuild the perfect app.

Focus on bare minimum you need to get a customers
It can be super clunky, no code involved.

4. Going Viral

"The product is so awesome it will sell itself!" -- it won't
Survivorship bias
Consider more sustainable Marketing plans
Wordle....but for every Wordle, there are 1000 apps that didn't go viral.
Take a step back, think about what YOU can do to move the needle
doesn't have to be fancy
- go to meetups,
- send emails
- don't need to be scalable at first, just get a couple users and go from there
- it's slow but it IS growth

5. Building More Features
- "if i only built X, my viral launch would have worked"
- use case requests from 1 customer
- Use a feature request page to get feedback from users. Is this a thing that ONE person asked for or a bunch? Will the person that asked actually be able to PAY for this? Are they the person that makes purchasing decisions at a company?
- ask for a deposit or pre-payment for a feature

Ask yourself / customers: How much time am I going to save this person in a month?
Use that to figure out how much to charge

6. Building for yourself, or other developers

devs love to build tools for themselves
often very specific use cases
devs will always tell you how they would have built it better
"How many devs can I REALLY reach with this use case?"
"How does this fit into the dev lifecycle? And will they just code it themselves instead?"
They will often write their own version

Your first ideas that come to you that are dev centric
Take a step back
there may be other problems where you may have more of an impact somewhere else

Developers all have opinions - it's a tough crowd

7. Burning Out
really common
have to really think about how you'll spread your time
Balance w/ work, biz, family can be difficult
It's ok to ask for help or find ways to hire help
think of sustainable ways to fit your business into your life
taking care of yourself is taking care of your business

Be honest: it's going to go slower than you'd expect, going to take time
It's important to ask for hep - don't have to do it ALL by yourself

Because I COULD learn something, doesn't mean that I SHOULD learn something
For example, bookkeeping - delegate this out

Don't have to delegate/hire right away. Be scrappy while you can
But as things grow, you need to be more professional
Upwork, Fiverr, etc.
Ask your network "do you know a bookkeeper?" etc

Hustle culture is not a long term plan
have a "push weekend" when you need to, but that is not sustainable long term

Keep it simple--
we really just have to go out there and start doing stuff
then you'll make mistakes
and that's ok, you'll learn from it
build something really simple, launch it, and try to get some customers

biggest struggle will be marketing
make a simple widget that solves ONE problem, and try to go sell it to people
see what they say, what happens.
you'll have to be on the sales calls, talking to these early customers.

As a developer we love to solve problems
sometimes you wont need CODE to solve them
could just be a business operations thing

you don't HAVE TO build a codebase product
devs will have advantages here, but its ok t build something else

learn bout bookkeeping, cost of operations, etc.
all of this will help you

Resources -
indiehackers.com
online community for small biz owners - mostly software developers
Startups For The Rest Of Us - podcast about building a biz from the perspective of a software developer, Host: Rob Walling, Founder of Drip (e-commerce, email marketing platform). Lots of guests on this show too, talking about their experiences.

Books:

The Embedded Entrepeneur: How to build an audience-driven business. Arvid Kalh
The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick

Don't be afraid of competitors
not a bad thing
means there is a market for it
so think about ow you'd do it differently, etc.
Understand where the budgets are in that space.

Find communities of people doing the same thing as you
helps when things get rough and you're thinking of giving up, to have folks going thru the same thing to talk with
IndieHackers community is great for this

Emma's contact info:
Twitter: @emmafletcher
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/efletch