Non-Technical Founder? 5 Ways to Build Your SaaS Product

0:00Hey everyone. So, many wonderful founders here, but I want to talk to a specific subset of you. Those solo non-technical founders that have some, you know, ideas about a technical product and you don't know how to put it out there. But, it's okay, you're not alone. I'm here to help. My name is Adrian. I'm a product-minded engineer. I built I turned entrepreneur. I built a low-code tool called Avo and I'm a part of Tinyseed We're a part of Tinyseed

0:27spring 2024. So, from my conversations with other solo non-technical founders, we kind of identified two main problems. The first problem is thinking too big. And we are basically told to think big. The sky is the limit. The world is your oyster. There's no mountain too high. And there are a few mountains that are kind of

0:50that high. You know the drill. Find a problem, see if it's painful, see if they'll pay for it, and then build a solution. But, I want you to stick to building that solution as fast as possible. You might think you need a 20-people team by the end of the year with front end, back end, DevOps and teams

1:09because Google does it. But, you don't. You're not Google. You're not building the same thing. So, I think it's better to find a role model that's kind of best better suited for you and that's at your level and in your current stage. You'll find plenty of those teams in this community and in the

1:26Tinyseed community. The second problem is choosing the right tool for the job. And I'm here to tell you that there aren't there isn't just one tool. There are so many tools in your tool shed. You just have to pick the right one for your current stage. And I'm here to talk to you about five potential solutions that you can apply and one extra tip which is very

1:48important at the end. So, the first one, get yourself a founder. So, I have spoken with a few founders that are non-technical and they can make it work. But it's it's difficult. I have to take product decisions, you have to architect the product, chunk it up into milestones, give it to the developer, ensure they build the right thing. It's like it's a lot to do here and you still have to do

2:10sales, marketing, and also operations. So it's a it's a big job for just one person. So yeah, you'll give up some of that equity, but you're going to get a sparring partner, someone that will help you with everything, but most importantly they will take this off of your plate. If you're just starting off, you can choose no

2:31no-code tools. This especially works if your product is a little bit like kind of like a spreadsheet where you have like a table or a list of things. You click a thing, you see the details. You click a button, you edit the thing. So tools like Airtable and Zapier for process automation, they'll take you very, very

2:47far. If you want to get your hands a little bit dirty, if you took like an engineering class at some point, if you know how website is built or what a database is, you might want to muck around with low-code tools. Tools like Retool or Bubble, these are cloud tools. Or you can go self-hosted with Avo and N10 and you can go really, really far. Bubble is probably the one that you know the most and it's kind of like at the intersection of no-code and low-code and it will enable you to build

3:17a cool and unique app for your product. I want to address the elephant in the room, AI-generated software. We've all seen those demos when somebody prompts, I want an app for a florist and you see the preview, you know, boxes bigger, smaller, the text everything, you know, gets shuffled on the screen and at the end you kind of have an app where you can manage your flowers or your customers. There are even those demos that actually upload and deploy that application. You get like a tiny URL to give to your customers and that is impressive. We didn't have that until

3:52now. But, there are a few caveats. The reality is that software isn't done with just one prompt. You have to push it to production and then continually iterate with that. And sometimes, you know, AI might be a hit or miss. The way that I think about AI and software and AI-generated software right now, it's kind of like this beautiful Yamaha musical keyboard. It has a lot of effects, a lot of loops, but you have to know which buttons to press and what to listen for in order for music to come

4:20out. Number four, hire somebody to build your app with you. Uh and the first question that pops up, should I hire one or more developers? And I want to tell you that one developer is enough. You can quote me on that. But, they have to be a certain type of developer. They have to be product-oriented, and I'm going to talk a little bit about what that means. So, first of all, they should be full stack. They should be able to build a user interface where your customer comes in, they can see the the design and the buttons they can press, but they should also be able to

4:51build a back end, which is basically the processes and database and everything that happens when somebody presses a button. Um so, basically, they can build a full app for you. They have should have an eye for design. Uh maybe they don't work within Figma or Photoshop, but they should see when buttons aren't lining up or like colors

5:10don't match up or the header is too big. You want somebody that can steal a design for you. They should know the customer, ideally want to talk to the customer. I they want to uh empathize very well with their problems so they can uh be independent in building the solution. You don't want to be the only interface

5:27between the developer and the customer. They should uh talk to each other. Uh they should be passionate about what they're doing. They want to put out value into the world, something that other people use. You probably don't want a task-driven person at this moment in time. So, let's say you kind of found this mythical creature that will help you put

5:48up a lot put out a lot of product. Uh and then there's there's one more thing. You want to hire more to basically put out more product into the world. But, that's unfortunately probably not the best idea for you. So, what will happen uh in the beginning of when you start your product, you're probably going to have video calls with this person every day. Copyright is going to change. Uh the design is going to change. The app is going to change. The freaking mission of the company is probably going to going to change. So, you will you will be able to do that and pivot only

6:19because it's just you and them. There's only one line of communication. When you bring on more people, this is what happens. Uh you can get around this a little bit and I'm going to tell you a give you an example of how you can do that. Let's imagine you're building a social media management app. You can bring one developer to build a whole product where they can see the social media and they can manage it and everything. And maybe this app has to talk to LinkedIn to a an API. You can bring another developer and they can do just that. So, basically they are a little bit uncoupled and they

6:48don't have to know about the whole mission of the story uh of the product. Uh we talked a little bit about how you can do this internally, so hiring somebody, getting a co-founder, building it yourself. But, there are ways of building it externally. And that that's usually through a consultancy. Consultancies can have uh pros and cons. Some of the pros are they can help you with prototyping and design and they can even give you a project manager. And that's especially helpful if you are not

7:15very technical and very technical savvy. Uh you might have an idea about how your product should run, should look, and what it should do. But, whenever you talk to a developer, uh you know, things might get lost in the translation. So, having a project manager there as a buffer, they will properly understand what you're trying to build and then translate that to the developer. And in turn, when the developer builds it, they'll make sure that they build the right thing. There are a few cons, you know, they might be a little bit pricier. But, the biggest con I see that is that you're probably going to have to

7:43stick to a more fixed timeline with milestones. You won't be able to pivot that easily. So, it's tipping time. You don't have to tip me, don't worry. Um but, I'm going to give you a tip, and it's very important. Uh eventually uh in my conversations with these non-technical founders, we get to this point about, "Okay, which technology should I use? What kind of uh software should I use?" And they try to rationalize it in the classical way, okay, who has the most numbers, who's the loudest, they might they might be the best. And I'm here to tell you that that might not be the best solution for

8:17you at this time. So, there are hundreds of millions of dollars put into companies to build new services, new infrastructure, new dev tooling, and they use a lot of those money of that money to do marketing. And um these are all good solutions, but maybe you don't need them right now. And in the beginning, I want to tell you to embrace boring technology. Technology

8:37like Ruby on Rails and Laravel. Technology that has been around for 10, 15, 20 years. They have been slowly iterating and improving, and basically fixing most of our engineering problems. Um if you check most of the successful bootstrap businesses, they have been built on these boring technologies. Uh they they come with an extra um advantage that the developers, they actually want to ship product on this technology. They don't want to chase the new shiny thing and, you know, rewrite it every 6 months. So, that's another

9:10benefit. So, let's bring it all together. First of all, think smaller, try to get to that first peak before getting to the mountain. Second, be intentional about your path, choose the right tool for the job, and finally, embrace the boring technology cuz this is what is going to uh enable you to ship value uh very, very fast. Before I go, I have this cool desk plates things, embrace boring technology. So, see me after and let's continue the conversations cuz I want to give them to you. Thank you so

9:40much. My name is Adrian. [applause]