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Ask HN: What do you wish your non-technical co-founders knew how to do?

23 points by adam ↗ HN
My co-founder, who was the technical genius of the duo, left our company awhile back and I've needed to trial-by-fire learn a bunch of new things to help with product development, make scaling/environment decisions, and help troubleshoot support requests. I've also realized these skills are important so as not to perpetually annoy my technical employees and contractors with idiotic requests (not to mention wasting money.)

Short of straight up coding, what, technically, do you wish your favorite non-technical cofounder knew how to do to help you function better in your job or let you focus on the most important things. For example:

* deciphering production logs

* proficiency in vi or another editor

* rails console or similar

* reading a postfix or sendmail log

* basic git commands, reading commits

* analytics and testing

* enough HTML/CSS/JS to make content edits on a corporate homepage

* decipher server/application alerts to understand what's a real issue, what isn't

11 comments

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tjtrapp
I would suggest you start with analytics and testing. This way you can test everything and use GA (or whatever) to gain insight into your app/sites usage.

If you wanna really geek out, try to learn HTML+CSS and build some mocks.

Logs? After you review a prod log and notice a bug or exception, you create a bug and assign it to a developer. I guess this could be helpful. But that dev will probably review the same log and do some tests to find a root cause then go fix it. I feel the same for any log review or server/app alerts. Unless you know the code, its simply one interpretation.

Editors? I'm not sure this will help out much.

Git? I think that anything git related will eventually lead you to code.

Testing + Analytics, imo, should be your sweet spot for now.

Good luck.

adam
I think the reason I began trying to understand production logs and bug alerts was more of a calming mechanism than anything else. The developers get the same alerts and are already reviewing the logs, but by me understanding them I rarely need to ask if it's anything to worry about, etc. So it's not really me trying to help them with anything, it's more about knowing when to be worried vs. not, say if a client is launching their site on our platform tomorrow and I see some New Relic error come through at 2am the night before.
trekkin
Non-technical co-founders should take care of the business side of the start-up equation - marketing/sales/PR/community building/fundraising/etc.
davidbanham
I don't need them to do technical things on the product, although the ability to update website copy would be nice.

The #1 thing is the willingness to learn to pull your own analytics and reports. This can be really time consuming when the business side doesn't adequately define their information needs and a report needs to be iterated several times.

Another irritant is version control. NewDeck-v16-StevesEdit.ppt is a nightmare and really slows things down.

I don't want them to be good at my job, I want them to be good at theirs.

brnlsl
I think this depends a lot on the team you’ve got. If you don’t have a technical co-founder or CTO type that’s in charge of overseeing the technical side of your business, then you’ll be well served to familiarize yourself with some of this stuff. Having insight into the technical side of things can help you to better understand the state of your business. You’ll also gain an understanding and appreciation for what your tech guys are dealing with, which can use to better manage them.

Keeping an eye on your code repository (reading commit messages) is a worthwhile exercise. Some of it might be over your head if you aren’t a developer, but perusing a bit will help you understand the state of your application. You shouldn’t need to learn git to do this - GitHub or whichever service you’re using will have a web-based interface for you to browse.

Echoing what others have said, business analytics is a big one. Understanding how to make the most of things like Google Analytics, MixPanel, etc can be very worthwhile. Integrating these into your application is a job that will fall on your developers, but deciding what to track and interpreting the results is something you can/should handle.

Should you learn vi or go digging through logs? It’s probably not the best use of your time, but if you’re truly curious then I say go for it.

orangethirty
They need to know how to run A/B tests on the product site. This requires some technical knowledge, but nothing a good hacker cannot setup properly. This ability will allow the business co-founder to be able to grow the business much faster.
10dpd
+1 on the Analytics and testing side, but what is truely important is that you build a good mental model of the product from a high-level, technical point of view. You don't need to know the nitty-gritty details of implementation, but you do need to know how the varios components of the product work together.
PeterisP
Business data analysis.

Any serious product will have a bunch of metrics and analytics - on usage, on customers, on finances; but if the non-tech people can do their own reports and analysis from the core data, then it saves a lot of time in coding, and allows the business guys much faster reaction time as they can get the answer they want right now instead of waiting a day for a custom report to be "requirementsdiscussedunderstood", built, checked and deployed.

And I've seen finance gals/guys do such analysis in excel that it would take weeks to do them as well in the data analytics code.

Cardeck1
Why would you do that?You are a non-technical co-founder.You have other priorities.You just need a basic understanding of how things work but you don't need to dive into the technical realm.

I am a developer but even I have to admit that some or must of us are too cocky these days, thinking we can do everything by ourselves.That is pure crap.Most devs fail to have a huge impact in the industry as entrepreneurs.That's where you guys come in.Don't think you are useless.You need both parts to make it work.

Contrary to the popular belief a non-tech can be a breaker in a company if he is "that type of guy" with an excellent, CLEAR vision.Yet those are rare indeed.

tobylane
I just had to fix a hacked website, turns out it was severely overdue for a Wordpress update (which fixed it). My admin explanations did explain how to update it, but I was still called on to do it. I'd hope a cofounder would update Wordpress before calling me.
cloudout
I heard the reverse of this question a week ago at a lunch. Starting to think that in a lot of cases, this might be a symptom of other issues (communication etc), because it sounds like each side is reaching outside of their "killer app skills", which may not be the best use of each person's time. Not always, but mostly, the goalie should goal-tend and the striker should strike.