Dan Martell - May 16, 2022


How To Manage A Tech Company As a Non-Technical Founder

Topics
technical talent management CICD pipeline
Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Rosetta Stone Jenkins
Dan, how do you have so much motivation？ #shorts Full Episode Link In Pinned Comment #Shorts

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

191.2

Word count

2,503

Sentence count

138


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I share with you how to manage a SaaS, a technical product, as a non-technical founder. Maybe you re worried that you re gonna spend all your time and energy building something that doesn t even work, that just falls down on the weight of the usage, and you don t have enough technical knowledge to feel comfortable building a software product. And maybe you ve done the leap already and you re about to make the decision but you're worried that the wheels are gonna fly off, or you re scared that you won t find the talent you re looking for, or that somebody will run away with your idea and steal your code.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Some of you guys might be like,
00:00:01.260 well, I don't wanna learn this stuff.
00:00:02.800 Here's the deal.
00:00:03.380 I'm not asking you to write code,
00:00:04.680 but I'm asking you to dive in and learn these three things.
00:00:21.140 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell,
00:00:22.600 serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:25.160 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you
00:00:26.660 how to manage a SaaS, a technical product
00:00:30.220 as a non-technical founder.
00:00:31.840 Maybe you're worried that you're gonna spend
00:00:33.660 all your time and energy building something
00:00:36.240 that doesn't even work, that just falls down
00:00:38.420 on the weight of the usage, it's super buggy,
00:00:41.180 and you don't have enough technical knowledge
00:00:43.880 to feel comfortable building a software product.
00:00:47.080 And maybe you've done the leap already and you're in it
00:00:49.380 and you're worried that the wheels are gonna fly off,
00:00:51.680 or you're about to make the decision
00:00:53.340 but you're scared that you won't find the talent
00:00:55.100 or you won't know how to manage them
00:00:56.320 or somebody's gonna run away with your idea
00:00:58.020 and steal your code.
00:00:59.160 All those things are true.
00:01:00.420 I'm gonna share with you today
00:01:01.800 is the four specific strategies that if you implement
00:01:05.300 will make this 10 times easier
00:01:09.280 to allow you to move forward
00:01:10.900 without worrying about those challenges.
00:01:14.100 Let's get into it.
00:01:15.160 So be sure to stay at the end
00:01:16.540 because I'm gonna tell you how to get access
00:01:17.960 to my Idea to Exit mini course
00:01:19.960 where I talk about how to prototype pre-sell
00:01:23.560 and hire your dev team
00:01:25.660 if you're just getting going.
00:01:27.280 But more importantly, I wanna tell you
00:01:28.600 why I feel qualified to share these ideas with you.
00:01:32.560 So first off, I taught myself how to code as a 17-year-old.
00:01:35.940 I didn't go to university, I'm self-taught.
00:01:38.660 I thought, like many people,
00:01:40.300 some of you guys have gone through coding boot camps,
00:01:42.080 that for me to be successful in SaaS and technology,
00:01:45.460 I need to learn how to code.
00:01:47.080 And I went year after year, writing code, writing code,
00:01:50.600 probably wrote code for five years,
00:01:52.560 until I realized I'm not the best at this.
00:01:55.520 When you meet a 10X programmer,
00:01:57.500 you meet somebody that absolutely loves code,
00:01:59.640 and maybe that's you, it just certainly wasn't me.
00:02:01.540 I was more of a ideas guy, I like to talk to customers,
00:02:05.640 I wanna figure out where the opportunity is,
00:02:07.120 maybe sell a little bit, do some marketing.
00:02:09.620 And even though I've hired 200 engineers
00:02:12.740 across all my companies, I just hired three last week,
00:02:15.540 I've coached over 700 plus non-technical SaaS founders
00:02:20.740 to lead successfully and grow their SaaS companies.
00:02:25.520 And many of them, I've helped them avoid the pitfalls
00:02:28.860 which I'm gonna share with you today.
00:02:30.240 These are the four strategies that are gonna allow you
00:02:33.280 as a non-technical founder to play the game
00:02:36.100 at the highest level in a world of technical people.
00:02:39.520 So let's get into it.
00:02:40.700 Number one, how to find talent.
00:02:42.600 So here's the deal.
00:02:43.500 Most people ask me like, Dan, I've got this crazy good idea.
00:02:46.840 I wanna hire a programmer.
00:02:48.600 Where do I find somebody who can build this for me?
00:02:51.160 Here's the reality.
00:02:52.280 You could look at the college,
00:02:54.220 you could find your buddy,
00:02:55.580 you can ask your friends, all those stuff.
00:02:57.480 The truth is, is for 90% of the founders out there,
00:03:01.640 I'm talking about like products like Basecamp, Jason Free,
00:03:04.400 you guys probably know that,
00:03:05.680 to many others out there, products you use,
00:03:07.560 I know they're early origin stories
00:03:09.360 and many of them found developers
00:03:11.000 in other parts of the world.
00:03:12.520 The reason why, if you search on Google,
00:03:16.180 cheap developers or inexpensive developers
00:03:18.560 in other parts of the world,
00:03:19.300 you will find the countries today,
00:03:21.100 I want you to Google it,
00:03:21.940 I'm not gonna tell you what they are,
00:03:23.060 but you can probably guess.
00:03:24.540 There are certain countries that right now,
00:03:27.020 even though the world is going through this
00:03:29.120 like increase in salaries, if you haven't noticed that,
00:03:31.920 literally all my recruiting friends,
00:03:35.400 they're seeing 20, 30, 40% increases
00:03:37.840 in salary expectations across all roles.
00:03:40.760 And you're seeing this even in certain countries
00:03:42.860 that used to have really competitive,
00:03:45.860 inexpensive engineering talent are going up.
00:03:48.920 Some of them have doubled in the last four months.
00:03:51.840 So what I would recommend is to do the Google search
00:03:55.100 to find the countries today that have those people.
00:03:59.020 Literally, there's countries where you can hire a developer
00:04:01.560 for $2,000 a month full-time, talking 160 hours a month.
00:04:06.360 They're available for $1,200 a month, $1,500 a month.
00:04:10.840 I mean, it's incredible.
00:04:12.440 It shifts all the time.
00:04:13.920 And it doesn't take away from the concern
00:04:16.160 of being able to manage this person,
00:04:17.640 qualifying them, et cetera, which I'm gonna talk about.
00:04:19.720 But I need you to first understand
00:04:21.340 that most early stage development
00:04:24.700 needs to be kept on the lower cost level
00:04:27.160 because there's a good chance
00:04:28.840 that what you build initially
00:04:30.180 isn't exactly what you need to build
00:04:31.540 and you need to give yourself more time
00:04:33.720 and resources to eventually get there.
00:04:36.340 Number two is managing the technical talent.
00:04:39.080 So what I've seen over the years
00:04:41.920 in many of my coaching clients
00:04:43.260 is where they have sometimes a technical co-founder,
00:04:46.660 at least a technical partner
00:04:47.920 that's built a lot of the code for them.
00:04:50.340 And the challenge is they run into a day
00:04:52.060 where they feel like they're being held hostage, right?
00:04:54.900 The person wants a raise, they want more equity,
00:04:57.540 the partner wants to double their rates,
00:04:59.260 and the founder's like, how do I deal with this?
00:05:02.680 Well, I'm gonna give you the three specific tactical
00:05:05.640 and technical things that you need to do.
00:05:07.780 And some of you guys might be like,
00:05:09.480 well, I don't wanna learn this stuff.
00:05:11.020 Here's the deal, I'm not asking you to write code,
00:05:12.900 but I'm asking you to dive in
00:05:14.540 and learn these three things, okay?
00:05:16.680 It's just like if you open up a restaurant.
00:05:18.580 I'm not asking you to become a chef,
00:05:20.600 but I am asking you to be responsible for your kitchen,
00:05:23.440 meaning you need to understand product and food costs
00:05:25.920 and refrigeration and safety standards and all those things.
00:05:28.280 So the three areas is one is source code management.
00:05:32.940 In your business, if you can't find out
00:05:35.820 where your code is being managed and stored at,
00:05:39.000 you gotta fix that, okay?
00:05:40.140 So most people are using Git or GitHub.
00:05:43.080 You can use whatever source code management tool.
00:05:44.940 You just gotta ask your technical person,
00:05:48.460 hey, what code repository are we using
00:05:50.400 for the source code management?
00:05:51.660 And get yourself admin access, okay?
00:05:55.340 So that's number one, is source code management.
00:05:57.500 Number two is what's called the CICD pipeline, okay?
00:06:02.060 It's an acronym.
00:06:02.900 It stands for Continuous Integration
00:06:04.780 and Continuous Deployment of your code.
00:06:07.620 It's a fancy word to explain
00:06:10.400 the way multiple developers write code.
00:06:13.460 It merges together and then you push it
00:06:15.780 to staging or production.
00:06:17.440 or even you could build your own
00:06:18.720 local development environment.
00:06:20.380 But the CI-CD pipeline,
00:06:22.980 which is something you can Google
00:06:24.380 and there's diagrams on it that can show you how to do this,
00:06:27.640 will give you certainty that at least multiple people
00:06:31.960 working on the code are doing it in an efficient way.
00:06:35.360 So if you wanna avoid your code to be super buggy
00:06:38.200 or that it's not being built right
00:06:40.760 because you can't really build a CI-CD server
00:06:42.800 if you're not deploying in real time
00:06:44.680 and you wanna be deploying every day, ideally every week.
00:06:47.260 So you can ask your developer,
00:06:48.500 hey, how often are we deploying our code base
00:06:50.960 to staging our production?
00:06:52.280 If it's only every two weeks per sprint,
00:06:54.580 that's not a good way to do it.
00:06:56.080 You wanna build the code base
00:06:57.980 so that it can continuously integrate, continuously deploy.
00:07:01.100 See why it's called CICD?
00:07:03.860 And force them to go down that route.
00:07:06.700 And they might say, oh, it's too much.
00:07:07.960 We don't need to do that.
00:07:09.100 Don't listen to them, okay?
00:07:10.600 Send them this video.
00:07:11.480 Hey, if you're saying that to the founder,
00:07:13.280 stop saying that, it's not true, okay?
00:07:15.380 You know what you gotta do, deploy it, check it out.
00:07:17.840 There's a bunch of great technologies,
00:07:18.980 I'm not gonna get into it,
00:07:20.620 but you know, Jenkins is a good one
00:07:23.240 if you wanna look into that one.
00:07:24.360 And then the third thing is agile development.
00:07:26.160 So agile development is the process
00:07:28.000 of coming up with customer features and stories
00:07:31.460 and then building that for the engineering team,
00:07:34.420 creating the stories for the engineering team.
00:07:36.280 Most people have the developers write the code
00:07:39.420 and then the product becomes developer design.
00:07:41.480 And that is a very bad strategy for doing it.
00:07:44.620 So you wanna make sure that you use Agile.
00:07:46.540 So if you don't know what Agile is, buy a book,
00:07:48.320 read the book, go through the process,
00:07:50.500 become an Agile person, build an Agile team, okay?
00:07:54.460 But those are the three things.
00:07:55.660 If you said, I'm not technical
00:07:57.020 and I wanna survive in building my SaaS product,
00:07:59.680 what do I need to know?
00:08:00.640 I'm saying source code management, CICD pipeline,
00:08:05.240 and then Agile development.
00:08:06.800 You do those things, you will literally save yourself
00:08:09.440 all the pain that most of my clients have come to me
00:08:11.520 after they almost lose their code base
00:08:13.800 or almost get kept hostage,
00:08:15.760 or have to go through a big rewrite
00:08:18.420 because their code is spaghetti code
00:08:20.040 because they didn't have any process,
00:08:22.140 it's a scary thing.
00:08:23.120 So that's the area you need to focus on.
00:08:25.980 Number three, verify talent.
00:08:27.700 So look, if you've never hired a technical person,
00:08:31.060 you don't even know what good code looks like.
00:08:32.500 They might do a test project, show you the code,
00:08:34.340 and you're like, well, this looks good.
00:08:36.040 Here's my strategy, okay?
00:08:37.400 It's what I do even with my portfolio companies
00:08:39.840 at High Speed Ventures, is I hire a technical advisor.
00:08:43.560 I have a technical advisor.
00:08:46.700 I'm technical enough,
00:08:48.440 but I just don't have the time to do it.
00:08:49.980 So what I do is I hire somebody
00:08:52.340 that is very talented in development,
00:08:55.320 maybe works, well, very likely works for somebody else,
00:08:58.020 that I can't really hire, but I admire their knowledge, okay?
00:09:00.720 So you can hire people on Upwork,
00:09:02.220 you can find those people in your local city,
00:09:04.500 but you just wanna find somebody that's like really smart
00:09:07.340 at the code and the infrastructure and the architecture
00:09:10.220 to on a weekly basis, one hour a week,
00:09:13.160 come in, look at the code, look at the infrastructure,
00:09:16.480 talk to the team, and then report back to you.
00:09:18.600 Literally, they act as your kind of like Rosetta Stone
00:09:22.140 of understanding what's going on.
00:09:23.580 So they might see something go,
00:09:25.100 hey Dan, I just want you to know it's really weird
00:09:27.100 the fact that all of the logins for the database
00:09:30.700 is hard-coded in the front-end code.
00:09:32.900 And you're like, whoa, yeah, that sounds weird.
00:09:35.220 How would you do that?
00:09:36.380 They should put it in a configuration file
00:09:38.280 that should be locked down
00:09:39.220 and only available to X, Y, and Z person.
00:09:41.380 Okay, have you given that feedback to the team?
00:09:43.740 Yeah, all right, so I just want you to know
00:09:46.320 that you need to work with them
00:09:47.220 to make sure that gets changed in the next sprint.
00:09:49.580 Perfect, thank you very much.
00:09:51.220 That kind of advice, you know, you can get it from a coach.
00:09:54.920 You can hire a technical CTO coach.
00:09:57.960 My friend, Etienne de Bruyne,
00:09:58.980 has a program called Seven CTOs, you can check him out.
00:10:02.260 There are people out there, coach, mentor,
00:10:04.740 but an advisor, a technical advisor, hour a week,
00:10:07.140 that's, to me, how we verify the talent
00:10:10.120 to make sure that not only do we hire the right person
00:10:12.320 and they can also be involved in recruiting
00:10:13.940 to do final interviews, but they also monitor things
00:10:17.400 and they're just part of the ongoing sanity check.
00:10:20.480 It's no different than hiring somebody
00:10:21.820 to do secret shopper at your retail store or your restaurant
00:10:24.840 to come in, order a meal, do an assessment,
00:10:28.040 give you the report and you take that
00:10:29.620 and talk to your manager and say,
00:10:30.680 hey, this is what I heard from our secret shopper.
00:10:33.960 That's the same idea.
00:10:35.200 Number four is protect yourself.
00:10:37.680 So here's the challenge is as a non-technical person
00:10:43.880 trying to build a technical product,
00:10:46.260 there's just realities to this.
00:10:47.840 So one, you need to get insurance,
00:10:49.620 errors and omission insurance, make sure you have that.
00:10:52.620 There are bug bounty services that you can pay
00:10:55.700 to kind of essentially like hack your code
00:10:58.560 to find vulnerabilities.
00:11:00.560 But the big idea for protecting yourself
00:11:02.540 is forcing your team to document the architecture,
00:11:05.640 to outline how the code works.
00:11:08.580 Most non-technical founders don't even know
00:11:12.440 to ask for this, right?
00:11:14.280 Or to put all the logins into a shared login system
00:11:17.920 like a 1Password or a LastPass.
00:11:20.940 But that to me is the fourth step,
00:11:23.040 which is if you can get documentation
00:11:25.660 around how the diagramming of the software works,
00:11:27.860 if you can get some errors in the mission insurance
00:11:29.580 and you can get some bug bounty programs set up,
00:11:32.720 that's an 80-20.
00:11:34.500 Like you will literally protect yourself
00:11:36.940 from just low-hanging fruit vulnerability and attacks
00:11:40.300 that other people should find out
00:11:41.880 to help you protect the asset you invested.
00:11:45.580 Just like, again, if you owned a restaurant,
00:11:47.040 you would probably buy some insurance for that restaurant.
00:11:49.280 Same thing, you need to protect yourself
00:11:51.220 from your technical team.
00:11:52.840 But those are the big four ideas.
00:11:55.400 So quick recap, number one, find talent in other countries.
00:11:58.840 Number two, manage that talent by looking at the source code,
00:12:01.960 the CIDC pipeline, the agile development process.
00:12:04.780 Verify that talent by hiring an advisor.
00:12:07.420 And four, protect yourself, insurance,
00:12:11.200 bug bounties, and architectural diagrams.
00:12:14.720 So as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
00:12:16.820 I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
00:12:18.700 called the Idea to Exit mini course.
00:12:20.700 It was a program I created to help non-technical founders
00:12:24.400 come up with the right idea, prototype that idea,
00:12:28.000 sell it to the market before you write a check
00:12:31.340 to build it and then use that pre-sale
00:12:34.320 to go and hire a developer to build it.
00:12:37.480 You wanna click the link to get access to that.
00:12:40.100 That is my gift to you.
00:12:41.780 So click the link below to get access
00:12:43.280 to the idea to exit mini course.
00:12:45.400 That's my gift for you.
00:12:46.240 And if you liked this episode,
00:12:47.940 be sure to leave a comment and let me know
00:12:49.540 what is the number one takeaway?
00:12:51.120 What's the one thing you hadn't heard before?
00:12:53.340 Leave a comment below, let me know,
00:12:54.920 subscribe to my channel and be sure to smash the like button
00:12:57.420 so other people can find the video
00:12:59.400 because that's how the algorithms work.
00:13:01.220 And as per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business.
00:13:04.700 And I'll see you next Monday.