Dan Martell - May 16, 2022


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


Episode Stats

Length

13 minutes

Words per Minute

191.20006

Word Count

2,503

Sentence Count

117


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.