256. Top mistakes non-technical founders make & how to avoid them

If you’re building a tech product but don’t have a technical background, this episode will save you months of wasted time and thousands in unnecessary spend.

In this re-release of one of our most popular early episodes, Tech for Non-Techies founder Sophia Matveeva shares the 5 biggest mistakes non-technical founders make — and how to avoid them.

Whether you’re a  founder, a corporate innovator, or leading a new digital venture, these lessons will help you lead product teams effectively and build better tech businesses.

You will learn:

• Why hiring a developer first is a mistake — and who to bring in instead

• The crucial difference between product metrics and business metrics (and how to use both wisely)

• How Facebook and WhatsApp built great products by focusing on engagement before monetisation

• What non-technical leaders must know about giving clear, measurable instructions to product teams

• What success looks like in the early stages — and why early growth shouldn’t be the goal

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Non-Technical Founders' Challenges
02:26 The Importance of User Experience Design
10:36 Understanding Product vs. Business Metrics
16:21 Setting Clear Goals for Product Teams
20:13 Embracing Flexibility in Product Development
24:32 The Journey of Product Improvement Over Growth

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Transcript

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.435)
If you have an idea for an app or a tech business, this episode will help you save money, time and a lot of stress. And frankly, it is what I wish somebody had told me when I first started out. So if you're a founder or a corporate innovator, this lesson will be a great investment of your time today. Welcome to the Tech for an Techies podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach at Chicago Booth MBA, Sophia Matveeva.

My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak tech. On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes, and most importantly, share practical advice on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you.

Hello smart people. How are you today? I have been enjoying the beautiful weather in London this May and it has been unusually glorious. And today I am bringing you a re-release of one of my first ever episodes of this podcast. So this aired probably about five years ago. you know, interestingly, the top five mistakes that non-technical founders make, they are still the same because we're still teaching non-technical founders and they're still making these

same mistakes. So this is why I have brought this lesson to you again. We've got so many episodes on this show now that new listeners might not have learned the foundational concepts that I taught when this podcast first started out. So let's go, let's do this. Let's get started on the top five mistakes that non-technical founders make. And if you find this useful, then please let me know. You can do this by leaving the share of rating and review. And if you're not a subscriber,

Make sure to hit that subscribe button now to never miss another lesson. Today I wanted to talk to you about the most common mistakes that I've seen non-technical founders make. And I confess that some of those mistakes are mistakes that I've made. And I'm hoping that if you listen to this episode and take something away from it, it will actually save you time and money and a lot of pain.

Sophia Matveeva (02:26.786)
So let's get started on our lessons. The first hire you need to make is actually a user experience designer, not a developer. When I'm talking about hire, I'm not talking about full-time hire. This could be somebody you're working with as a freelancer. It could be an agency. But basically the first professional help that you need to get is not going to be a developer.

It is going to be a user experience designer. So once you have your idea and you've validated some of your idea and some of the business aspects behind it, then you go to a user experience designer. User experience designers will work with you to get your idea essentially out of your head into something that you can then use to give to developers. What is that something?

that something is called a prototype. We'll have much more about user experience design and prototypes and how all of that works in further episodes. But the first thing I need you to understand is once you get your idea, don't go to developers first, go to user experience designers and work with user experience designers to create a prototype. So that is lesson one. Lesson two.

And this is definitely a mistake that I've made is do not confuse business metrics with product metrics. So if you're a non-technical founder, you would usually have some idea of the business aspects, so the marketing aspects and the user aspects, but you probably don't know that much about product yet. Product is in this case, apps, websites, algorithms. So tech products, basically.

And by the way, I just want to tell you guys that when I'm saying non-technical founders, I don't necessarily mean just entrepreneurs. I also mean the people who are leading new technical endeavors within companies. So, you know, if you're working at a large traditional business and you've been given the task of creating a new app for a particular division and you're the business lead on it.

Sophia Matveeva (04:48.272)
these lessons apply to you. lesson two, don't confuse business metrics with product metrics. And this is definitely something that I did. So I'm going to give you an example from Facebook. A lot of us are Facebook users, so I think this is going to be familiar to a lot of us. So if you are a user of Facebook, and I'm not talking about an advertiser, you're just a normal user, do you pay to go on Facebook?

Do you give Facebook money? No, you don't. So you open Facebook, you open it on an app and then Facebook does its absolute hardest to make sure that you want to stay on it. So Facebook is going to give you notifications that it thinks are going to keep you interested. It's going to curate your newsfeed in a way that the stuff that they think is going to be most interesting to you is going to be at the top.

So the people you are most interested in, the people whose photos you are liking, the people whose content you're watching, know, if you've been cyber stalking your ex boyfriend, usually their stuff is going to come up in your newsfeed first. So Facebook knows if you're cyber stalking people. So why is it doing that? It's doing that because the more engaged you are on Facebook, the better it is for Facebook. So essentially,

Getting you to spend time on Facebook and reveal your preferences on Facebook, that's called engagement. What do I mean by revealing your preferences? It means not only opening the app or the website, it also means scrolling through, but also what do you do when you're interested in something on Facebook? You like something, you share something, you comment, you upload your own information.

Maybe if you're going somewhere, you tag yourself into that venue. So Facebook then learns your preferences. It learns where you are. It learns all the stuff about you. And because you're engaged and because you're revealing your preferences, Facebook can then serve you advertising that is really relevant for you. So for example, if you normally live in London, but you have gone to New York and you've tagged yourself in somewhere in New York,

Sophia Matveeva (07:11.544)
then Facebook will start sending you advertising of places to go in New York. And you're going to be much more likely to go to that particular place in New York because Facebook already knows not only are you in New York, but also what kinds of things do you do in London? You're probably going to be fairly interested in going to the same kinds of bars, doing the same kinds of activities in New York. So essentially what Facebook does is they keep you super interested on this free product.

They grab your attention and then they monetize your attention by selling you targeted advertising. Now, I've been an advertiser on Facebook, so I have paid Facebook to advertise. And I can tell you, it ain't cheap. Facebook is expensive. From what I've heard, I think about 50 % of venture capital money is now spent on Facebook advertising. So if you've got a company and you need to market it,

A lot of that marketing cost is going to go to Facebook. So clearly Facebook is monetizing their product. But what they do not do is they do not confuse their product metrics with their revenue metrics. So what they do is they make a very engaging product, which means you want to be on the Facebook app because you find it interesting. And then they take that product and they make revenue out of it.

So they don't go to their developers and they don't say, make us something that makes us lots of money. No, they go to their developers and they go to their designers. They make a product that makes you want to be on it. And then they decide how to monetize that product. Another example would be an e-commerce website. The aim of the product is going to be different from the business aim.

So the aim of the product, which might be an e-commerce website, would be to get users on it and then to keep them looking at new content. And that content could be stuff that you could buy. So making sure that it's easy to go from one photo to another, making sure that it's easy to zoom in on a particular product. That's good user experience. Good user experience and good user flow and then good notifications.

Sophia Matveeva (09:37.008)
could then translate to people buying things or to people buying more than they had expected. So for example, you go to buy some shoes, but the website cleverly suggests to you that, there's a bag that would go with these shoes or people who buy these shoes often also buy X, Y, Z. And then your spend increases. This is where you take a product and then you monetize it.

So the mistake here is don't tell your developers, don't tell your designers that you want to increase profitability. Profitability is a business metric and engagement is a product metric. So usually when you're talking to your product teams, you're talking about some kind of engagement metrics that are going to keep people looking and coming back and using your product. And then you as a business person decide how to monetize.

the fact that they're using your product. So now let's move on to the third mistake. Again, another mistake that I've made, I'm really not making myself look very good here. So another mistake is not setting a clear task to your product team. A clear task is we want to do X thing in Y amount of time. A not clear task is saying

We want to grow. aim is growth. So I've actually done this. So with the NT app, I remember telling our product team that our aim was to grow. So if you grow your user base by one person, or you grow it by a hundred people, or you grow it by a million, it's all technically growth. So whenever we had some kind of movement upwards, which, you know, we did on most days, then

As far as everybody else was concerned, that was good growth. We're getting great. And I was desperately unhappy because as far as I was concerned, the growth wasn't big enough. And actually that was my fault because if I had said, we want to reach this user metric within three months, then people would have had something clear to work towards. If you're just giving something vague, then you're going to get vague results.

Sophia Matveeva (12:03.827)
And that's not something to do with technology. That's literally something to do with being a good manager. So I'm going to give you an example of another thing that Facebook did cleverly. know, whatever you think of them now, they have been geniuses at product innovation and growth and revenue, obviously. So in the early days of Facebook, when they wanted to grow very quickly, they were analyzing their

user results, so how people were using it and they were trying to work out what kind of users are most likely to stay and to become active users. And what they noticed was that if you got onto Facebook and within the first 10 days of you being registered on Facebook, if you had connected with seven friends on Facebook, you were likely to be

a high user, so you're likely to be a retained user, which meant that you're likely to come back and keep on using it. So their aim was to get as many people to find seven friends on Facebook within 10 days. So that was literally their clear task to their team. And it worked. Facebook grew exponentially. And when you set a clear task like that, that means that

User experience designers are updating screens and maybe your backend developers are improving the upload times. Maybe you're developing a new algorithm to help people find friends. So there's so much into that that can be done by different technical professionals that then leads to achieving that thing. Very similarly on the NT app, we actually had this, you know, similar kind of thing. On the NT app,

Users who are primarily women get feedback from professional stylists and get outfit advice. So for example, you could take a photo and ask a question like, shall I wear this on a date tonight? And you'll get feedback about yes or no, and then you'll be told how to improve it, what you should add, etc. So we noticed that if a user asked three questions within the first week, they were 90 % likely to

Sophia Matveeva (14:24.469)
carry on using the product. If they didn't reach that three photo, three question metric, then their retention was really low. So they essentially didn't really get the full experience and then they left us. And so once we understood it, our product metric became, get as many people to reach that three question metric within the first week. How did we end up doing that? So once I set that task,

A user experience designer made our screens easier to follow and made it much easier and quicker to upload photos. We also then ended up creating preset questions to make it even easier to ask a question. So you didn't even have to type your question. You could choose one from five presets. So literally you could just use your thumb, I think four times and you'll be able to ask a professional stylist a question. Our developers worked on

the infrastructure. So they decreased our upload times. So you know that little circle that goes around when you're uploading a photo and if it goes around for too long, then you just think, sod it, I don't want to upload the photo. Well, they worked on decreasing the amount of time it takes to upload. And actually we then started moving closer and closer to that metric. Now as a non-technical person, I wouldn't have been able to create the right screens.

I wouldn't have been able to make the suggestions about the pre-filled examples. I certainly wouldn't have been able to create the infrastructure changes that our backend developers made. But by setting the correct task, which you can see here is based on user data, by setting the correct task, everybody was able to move towards something really tangible.

Honestly, once I learned how to set the right tasks to people, then things started moving much better. And when I was saying random vague things like, let's grow, let's have a great product, that's totally useless. So don't do that. Okay. So now let's move on to lesson number four. One thing that I've seen people do mistakenly is stay rigid about their product.

Sophia Matveeva (16:49.767)
And I think since a lot of us come from traditional businesses, and there's such an emphasis on business plans, honestly, I think a lot of us fall in love with our ideas, we tend to think, no, it's going to be my way or the highway. And we think, okay, we're going to create this product, and this is what it's going to do, and this is who it's going to be aimed at, and this is how people are going to use it.

then we release it and then we work out that actually our target market isn't really interested in it, but somebody else is interested in it. Or, okay, people are interested in the thing that we didn't think was going to be useful at all. Or maybe some aspects of the product are pretty good, but some are totally useless. And instead of taking the feedback from the users and actually seeing how people are using your product,

We sometimes tend to think, no, no, I'm right. I'm going to just keep on, keep on shoveling more money and more effort into this thing. Don't do that. Most products, most successful companies, most successful tech products have had to evolve with their users. They are co-created with their users. So this is the way you need to approach it. You're always releasing something, seeing how people use it and then

analyzing it and improving on that. So if you haven't yet listened to the episode about the most important thing you need to know about tech, go and listen to that because it talks about the cyclical production process. And honestly, that's the most important thing you need to understand. But essentially in the cyclical production process that technology uses, what you're always doing is you're releasing incrementally, you're seeing how people use it and who uses it, and then you improve.

which basically means you're co-creating something with your users. And it means that you're not going to be wedded to your idea. It often means that your product and your customer base end up being completely different to what you originally expected. So in a very, very simple example, when I first started Tech for Non-Techies, literally it was aimed only at non-technical founders. That was it. I was a non-technical founder.

Sophia Matveeva (19:13.735)
I knew what those problems were that as an audience I understand, sympathize with, and can speak to. Now the tech from non-techies audience has expanded to people who want to get into tech from non-technical careers, people who work in tech companies, but they just want to understand their jobs and their employees better, and people who want to bring digital innovation to their employees. So for example, I remember I even had a student who worked

at a large oil company and he was trying to work out how to bring digital innovation to them. And that's not something that I was ever expecting. So grow with your users, grow with your product. Don't just say, this is what we do, this is who we do it for. And if you don't fit that, then go away. No. Now the last mistake that I wanted to cover with you is another one that again, I've made and honestly, I see it really, really often is that you

emphasize growth as opposed to product improvement in the early stages. This is especially difficult to do if you've got investors and especially difficult to do if you've got angel investors who maybe don't understand the technology space and product development. And frankly, most angel investors don't. So what do I mean by this? So a lot of the companies that you associate with big tech success today,

actually looked very, very different right at the beginning. For example, WhatsApp, it was founded in January 2009. That's when it was registered as a company in California. And in the original WhatsApp, the only thing you could do was show your status. So literally you would have your name. So in my case, Sophia Matveva, and then it would have your status. So my status today would be recording a podcast. And there were no

notifications at the time because Apple didn't have notifications that technology didn't yet exist and there was no messaging. I mean, this is exactly what we use WhatsApp for. We use WhatsApp for messaging and we find out about our messages when we get push notifications. And I'm telling you that the version of WhatsApp didn't actually do either of those two key things. And you know, the founders are now billionaires, so clearly something worked out well. I would recommend

Sophia Matveeva (21:38.285)
If you're having a tough time with your product, have a look at the WhatsApp story. I find it quite inspiring, especially for the early days. But essentially what's important to understand and explain to your investors that when you first release your product, your aim is to improve the product, work on the product, learn how people use it and grow very, very slowly. Your aim is to improve the product. Your aim is not

to go from zero to a million in the first month. That is not a good idea. The likelihood of your first product being pretty rubbish or not really doing what you want it to do is very, very high. Again, look at the WhatsApp story. You could upload your status update and your name, and that's it. Is that particularly interesting? I mean, yeah, maybe it was in 2009, but even then.

And this is something that I would really explain to the people that you're also working with. So whether that's going to be your investors or whether that's going to be the non-technical people in your team, or if you're working in an innovation part within a traditional company, explain this to them. So you creating a product and then changing it and working on tweaks in the usability and what it actually does, that is a normal part of the process. This is like the R &D process.

It is not a failure. So each time you're creating something and each time you're getting some user data on it, that is a success. Even if that data is telling you, we don't like how this product is made, we don't like using it. If you're learning something, it is a success. What you're supposed to be doing is you're supposed to be learning and improving with those changes. So eventually in WhatsApp's case, eventually when

Apple released the ability to notify people, then WhatsApp built notifications into its platform. And then WhatsApp built messaging into its platform. So then it moved on to this iteration of the product that we know and we love using today. But you see that here, first of all, they needed to learn with the user. So how do people actually use the thing? But also they needed a technological advance from another company.

Sophia Matveeva (24:02.485)
to essentially propel them forward. So when you're building your product right at the beginning, remember that it's about learning and it's about improving your product and it's about improving your retention rather than going for crazy growth. Honestly, this is the kind of stuff that I wish somebody had told me when I was first starting out as a non-technical founder. It would have saved me time and money and effort and a lot of sleepless nights.

But you know, it wasn't there, but it's there for you. So I'm hoping that you find it useful. If you want more of this content, then check out our Tech Fun on Technical Founders course, which you can find on techfunontechies.co. That's techfunontechies.co. And it's a five week course and it goes into all the aspects of creating your first product from idea to actually a live product.

and on how to work with your tech teams. And if you liked what you listening to, which I hope you did, then please subscribe and leave a rating and review. Not only does it help me, but it also helps people like you find this kind of content and it helps people build their products and launch their careers in tech. So please subscribe, rate and review. Until next time, thanks for listening.