283: Why successful business owners fail at tech

You’ve built a successful business before. So why does tech feel harder than it should?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth. The instincts that made you successful offline can quietly sabotage you when you build tech or add AI.

In this episode of Tech for Non-Techies, Sophia breaks down the four traps she sees again and again among high-performing business owners. Not beginner mistakes. Smart, expensive ones.

You’ll learn why working harder often backfires, why “moving fast” can burn cash, and why delegation without product leadership creates chaos. Plus, what to do instead of learning to code or wasting six figures.

This is about thinking clearly, sequencing correctly, and using your strengths without letting them turn into blind spots.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Why doing “hard things” in tech often leads to burnout — not progress
• The quiet reason speed destroys value before a product is validated
• What happens when developers build their vision instead of yours
• The hidden cost of following tech advice that wasn’t made for business leaders

Resources from this Episode

FREE class: From Business Owner to Tech Founder, without the $100,000 developer disaster

Join this class to learn:

• The 2-step framework to go from idea to scalable tech product
• Why smart business owners waste $100k+ on their first tech venture—and how to avoid it
• When AI helps vs. when it destroys products (and your ROI)

Sign up here: https://www.techfornontechies.co/january

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TRANSCRIPT

Sophia Matveeva  00:00

If you're a successful business owner, the very skills that made you thrive are the exact skills that could sabotage your tech venture. Today, I'm going to show you the four traps that cost founders months, money and sanity and how to avoid all of them.

Sophia Matveeva  00:22

Hello, and welcome to the tech for non techie podcast. I'm your host. Sophia matveyeva, if you're a non technical founder, building a tech product or adding AI to your business, you're in the right place. Each week you'll get practical strategies, step by step, playbooks and real world case studies to help you launch and scale a tech business without learning to code. And this is not another startup show full of jargon venture capital theater or tech row bravado. Here we focus on building useful products that make money without hype and without code. I've written for the Harvard Business Review and lectured at Oxford, London Business School and Chicago Booth. So you are in safe hands. I've also helped hundreds of founders go from concept to scalable product, and now it's your turn. So let's dive in. This episode is sponsored by the tech for non technical founders program, the only step by step program that takes you from idea to market ready product without wasting $100,000 or more on completely avoidable mistakes. If you already spent money on developers and you've got nothing to show for it, you're not alone, but you do need to understand what went wrong so it doesn't happen again, and if you haven't hired developers yet, that's actually even better, because the biggest mistake is not hiring the wrong people, it's hiring the right people before you know what you're doing. And this is why I am hosting a free live class on January the 13th, 2026 where I'll show you the exact two step framework to go from having an idea in your head to a scalable tech product. And it's the same framework that I've taught at Oxford University, London Business School and TechStars. And you'll learn why smart business owners blow 100k on their first tech venture. You'll also learn when AI helps versus when it destroys your product. And you'll also learn how to think like a tech founder instead of being just a developer client with a credit card. And this is also when I'm going to be opening enrollment for the tech for non technical founders program. And in that program, that's where you'll get lessons on demand, and you'll also get private one on one sessions with world leading experts to help you go from idea to tested product to scale. So make sure that you sign up for the free class on January the 13th, 2026 at Tech for non techies.co. Forward slash January. That's tech for non techies, dot, SEO, forward, slash January. And the link for that class is also in the show notes, because your next $100,000 spend, it should go toward growth, not toward painful lessons.

Sophia Matveeva  03:19

Hello, smart people. How are you today? You know, I've been noticing a pattern lately about double edged swords, when the thing that makes you really successful in one field actually bites you in the bottom in another. And I find that with high achievers, you can actually high achieve yourself into oblivion. So for example, you are probably already a business owner, which puts you in this really rare category of humans who have seen a gap in the market and have actually done something about it. So you've taken action, you've built something real. You've definitely had a lot of setbacks. So you're very responsible, you're very driven, you're very capable, and these qualities make you really excellent at what you do, but they can also wreck your journey as a tech founder. And if you're not a business owner, but you are really, really good at your job and you're hyper responsible, let's say you're managing a business unit, these traps also apply to you. So I'll give you a quick example. I used to work in a really prestigious private equity firm in London, before I went to Chicago Booth to do my MBA. And in both of these institutions, in the private equity firm and at Chicago Booth, you basically had to be perfect at pretty much everything. Your emails had to be perfectly formatted. There were absolutely no typos, and if there was ever even a single typo in your email, you got hell for it, like that's where I used to work. Your spreadsheets had color coding, and you were also making forecasts and plans for what would happen in the next five years. And literally, investors were investing millions upon millions with us, so they wanted to see these forecasts, and not having an answer to a question was basically completely unacceptable. So if your boss, or God forbid, an investor, asked you something, you had to have the information at your fingertips. So basically, I spent ages, and frankly, many a late night reading research reports and trying to have every fact and figure to have. So basically, after years of this kind of training, which was really training for really polished precision, I started a tech company. So when I graduated from Chicago Booth, when I was at Chicago Booth, I was already working on this idea, and when I was getting close to graduation, I decided to pursue the tech venture, as opposed to basically get a proper job. And I raised some money, and I hired a team, including developers. And basically I then thought that, you know, to be professional, to be successful, you had to have this polished precision. So I brought that to my tech startup, and it was completely inappropriate. It really annoyed my team, and also didn't actually get any results, and it exhausted me. So like, I wanted to make five year forecasts about spending and revenue for a product that didn't exist yet, and when it actually did exist, it kept on changing. So it was like this living creature that just kept on evolving, and I was trying to predict what it would be like in five years time, when you know it was really different just two weeks ago, another thing that I didn't know that reading industry research reports in great depth was not really a useful thing, and actually the most useful thing I could be doing is speaking to our app users every day instead. So basically, what I did was that I spent a lot of time. I spent a lot of effort doing things that did not move the needle. But those things, you know, they were not necessarily pleasurable. They really tied me out. And also I just annoyed everybody. I really annoyed my team, and I don't want the same for you, which is why I have made this episode. I've identified four patterns that I have seen again and again in successful people, and especially in business owners, because the business owners, these are the hyper responsible action takers. So these are the four patterns that I see in these people who, when they enter the tech world and start their tech venture, here's pattern number one, I can do hard things. This is a great strength in business, but sometimes it can bite you in the butt. I know you can do hard things. So can I but that doesn't mean that we should, in the immortal words of Chris Rock, you can drive with your feet if you want to, but that don't make it a good idea. So let me tell you a story about a former student of mine, and let's just call the student John. So John already runs a successful consultancy. John knows his market, he has contacts. He's got real insights. And he basically, when he was building this consultancy, he saw a gap in the market for a very specific tech product that could really fill a need, and not only fill a need, but actually make money, because it's in a pretty lucrative industry. So he basically had this fantastic idea for a tech tool. And John is not afraid of hard work. So when he had this idea, this was before he came across tech foreign techies, but he was doing some research, and he heard about no code tools, and he discovered bubble, and he thought, Okay, well, basically it says that I can just build everything myself. So I'm going to build my product on bubble, and then I'm going to show it to people, and we'll basically take it from there. And if you've never tried bubble like now, it's getting a bit easier, because it has AI tools. But before AI tools, it was made for non technical people. But there really was a learning curve. It was less of a learning curve than learning coding, but it was still a pretty steep learning curve. So he climbed up that curve. He learned bubble. He spent weeks on it, and he stopped. He was creating his product, and in the meantime, he actually had a business to run. He had clients, he had a team. He also has a family, like, he has things to do. He's a busy man, and so by the time he came across tech one and techies and we had a chat, this guy was exhausted, understandably, and he was also kind of annoyed when I basically told him, like, just dump this. Like, stop doing what you're doing. You're going down the wrong path, and what is the right path instead? I mean, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you will know the right path is to build a test product as quickly as possible. It doesn't need to contain any code. It's literally just the test that you create. You can do that using AI if you have the right guidance. If you have the right prompts, if you know something about user experience design, you can actually create this test product in less than half a day. And this is what we teach people to do in that, in our tech Pro and technical founders program with that, you take it to your target market, you run some tests, and you basically figure out, do people want this if they were to use it, what would need to change? Would they pay for it? And like, once you get those insights, then you can move on to building with either no code tools or usually, actually you end up working with proper developers anyway. My point is, the solution that I gave John is really simple, very easy to do, not time consuming, and is either cheap or free. Because a lot of these AI tools, there's a really good free tier, and it is completely the opposite of what he was doing. He was like, sweating into this tool. And so just because you can do hard things, it doesn't mean that you should. And if you have built this habit of pushing yourself and doing difficult things and overcoming yourself, your default can be to just do hard things without questioning whether you actually need to. Because sometimes the easy path is the correct path, so sometimes the cheap, easy way is the right way. So my advice to you, if you're identifying with John's story, don't default to working hard just because you can, because often, especially with this experimentation, when you're first getting your idea off the ground, working really hard on creating something that isn't proven is not a good idea. Okay, pattern two, this is what I see. Pattern two is, let's move fast and optimize later. And this might be a bit confusing, because we might remember what Mark Zuckerberg motto for meta was, which is, move fast and break things. So why am I telling you to be careful of this? Well, let's think about a traditional business, because in a traditional business, speed definitely wins in tech tube, but just in a different way. So let's have an example. You are. Let's continue with the consultancy example, because we all kind of understand what that is. So you are going to set up a consultancy, and you're going to launch a service, and then get customers, and you're not exactly sure what your offering is or exactly what clients are going to buy, but you know what, it's fine, because you're going to learn as you go. So you get the customers, and then if you see, okay, the people that were most interested, or the people that basically pay the highest bills, happen to be in healthcare, all of a sudden you're a healthcare consultant. And so basically your revenue validates your decisions. And this is definitely the right way to start and to grow and to build something in tech, it's similar, but the beginning is different, and this is where I want you to be careful moving fast to build something without validating it basically means that you're going to build the wrong thing and waste a lot of money, because you can soft launch a half baked offering to your client, you can basically, kind of wing it. When you're creating some sort of service business. At the beginning, you can say, Look, this is our basic This is our basic menu. This is what we're doing. If people say that they don't like your menu, you just literally change it tomorrow. However, you cannot do the same thing with, let's say, a database. Your database cannot be half baked, because this is serious stuff. This is client data, essentially once code exists. Rework is expensive, but if you're just making a PowerPoint presentation about your services, reworking it is super cheap and easy. This is why I want you to do this prototyping, this test, product testing phase, and I want you to take it really, really seriously, and I want you to have professional guidance to do it, because at the beginning it feels slow, and I know that when people are enthusiastic, they're like, Yeah, I'm going to do this. This is it. They just want to run around and speak to developers and start building things. But if you're building without a plan, you're basically going to likely have to scrap it all. So basically, when you are first getting into the tech world, go more slowly than you want to at the beginning, so you can move fast and break things later on in tech, if you just spend about four hours per week, literally for the next three weeks, creating a prototype and testing it and getting real feedback, and then iterating and with some guidance, actually, this is what's going to allow you to bring your product to market really, really quickly. So yesterday, I was teaching a class, and I spoke about. Two of our students, one of our students literally went from nothing like zero to a FinTech app that literally had people trading and investing on it within nine months. Another one of our students that I was talking about, she literally went from nothing to again, an app out that was being used by people and that was generating revenue within 11 months. So both of these are within less than a year. But in order to have this really, really speedy growth, in order for basically, their life and their career to change in less than a year, they had to go through this relatively slow and methodical process at the start. So speed wins right from the start in traditional business, but in tech, speed, without validation, destroys money and destroys time. So don't do it.

Sophia Matveeva  15:54

Okay. Here's pattern three that could bite you in the bum. Hire good people and get out of their way. Again, it's like, okay, what am I supposed to do with developers when I hire them? Or I'll tell you. So delegation is what we all need to do as business leaders. We all have to do it. We can't do everything ourselves, but delegation in tech without product leadership makes you fail. I'll give you an example in traditional business, great delegation means great leadership. Because, for example, you hire an accountant and you let them do their job. You are not going to go and get an accounting qualification. You are not going to check every single cell. Yes, once you get the final account, you kind of go through it and you see if there are mistakes and there are errors, but you don't, you know, sit over their shoulder being saying, like, what are you doing? It's the same. If you're hiring a lawyer or you're hiring a team, you're not micromanaging them. And with developers, you definitely can't micromanage them, because as a non technical founder, you don't know what they're doing. However, you have to be the leader of the product developers are not accountants, but they need direction for what the product is going to be. And if you get out of their way too much, and you let go of that product vision, essentially, they're going to build their vision, not your vision. And I know this because, unfortunately, I have done this. So remember in my first company, when we actually had the product and we had the users and we had traction, it was getting really exciting, and also we were getting quite a lot of press and investors were interested in it. It was like, really, really cool. It felt really cool. And essentially I was really busy, because the only person who could do the investor and press stuff, it was me. So at the time, we had a bunch of feedback from our users, because we were constantly doing user interviews about what to improve. And we basically had all this, all of this feedback. And we had a product team meeting where I basically said, Okay, this is the feedback. Based on that feedback. These are the next features that we need to prioritize, because this is what people really want. And I kind of gave this fairly rough outline, and then I left them to it, because I was busy running around being, you know, busy important. And so when the next version of our app came out, I was honestly looking at it and thinking, what is this like? Who did this? Why is this happening? Because it was nothing like I had expected. And then I got on a call with our product team, and I was like, Guys, what is this? And they basically said, Well, this was the feedback. This is how you explained it. So this is what we did. So yes, there was some of that vision that I told them about, but really it was more their vision, and it wasn't their fault. You know, if I'm not providing them, what would she be doing? If I'm not providing them the vision, they're just going to basically make it up as they go along. It was basically either that or do nothing, doing nothing they knew was not an option. So what we ended up doing was actually scrapping what they did and then going back to square one, and, you know, creating the new version from scratch, which obviously really annoyed them. But also just financially, it was a waste of money, because creating that version, it didn't lead to anything. We needed to completely scrap it, like I still had to pay the developers, right? Like I wasn't I wasn't going to pay I was not going to pay them because I didn't lead them properly. So yes, you are not going to be writing code, but you cannot delegate the vision of the product, because your job is to be the product leader, and their job is to basically make that vision come true. Because you can outsource coding, but you cannot outsource the understanding of your customers and the understanding of your industry and essentially what you are building. And again, if you're thinking, Okay, this sounds good in theory, but it's very theoretical. I don't understand what product leadership is. This is basically the skill set that we teach you inside tech fund on technical founders, because we do not believe that you need to learn to code. We believe that you need to understand how to lead your product team, how to work with them in a way that is productive for both of you, how to hire the right people, how to estimate budgets for that. We say that you need to learn to speak tech. So speak the language of technology, understand the jargon, understand the tech terms, understand how to set targets. That's speaking tech. It is not the same as doing tech, which is basically trying to do everything yourself, which is definitely a terrible idea. Do not do this. Okay, let's get to pattern number four. That's going to bite you in the butt. Pattern number four is, I have figured out things before I can figure this out too. So this is basically overconfidence, when confidence becomes a blind spot. And this is kind of tricky, because your confidence and your Self Reliance have made you successful in the first place. Because you know, if you weren't a go getter, you wouldn't even be listening to this podcast. You wouldn't have found it. You would be, I don't know, doing some sort of entertaining thing instead. So yes, these are wonderful, wonderful skills, and I don't want you to get rid of these qualities. I'm just saying that you need a framework to follow. If you're a non technical founder and you're building a tech product for the first time. Essentially, you're in the land of you don't know what you don't know. I remember literally sitting in front of Google, like, I just had Google open, and I remember thinking, I'm willing to learn anything, but I don't even know what I'm supposed to learn. Like, what do I what do I put into the like into the search field. Now that we've all got AI, you can literally put into chat GPT, what am I supposed to know as a non technical founder, but that will get you into trouble. So I don't recommend that you just go out onto the internet and try to figure it out. The reason is what I have noticed, and if you actually look closely, you will notice this too. A lot of the content online about how to build tech companies and how to build tech product is actually created by developers, for developers, not for non technical founders. So a lot of the online content that founders absorb comes from tech people speaking to other tech people. Often. These are very young men swapping tips with other very young men. And I think this is wonderful. This is a great thing for these very young men. It is much better than, I don't know, hanging around on the street and doing whatever things that other young men do so, chaps, keep it up. However, if you are a business owner building a tech product for accountants or for surgeons or for logistics companies, these young college guys, they are not your people.

Sophia Matveeva  23:17

So they have very different mindsets. They also have very different educations, and they have different backgrounds. So you know somebody who has been doing computer science, or somebody who's been doing engineering at a great, great school, and they are essentially sharing what they've learned, and they're sharing their tips, they're sharing for their peer group, and you're not in that peer group, you do not have the background to really follow their advice properly. This is why I have seen non technical founders who go online and basically try to use this advice, and they end up hiring developers too early, which is an extremely costly mistake, or they don't know how to instruct the developers properly, because, you know, these young chaps who are putting out this content, they don't even think that this good could be an issue, because it's not an issue for them. Or you end up getting the wrong developers for what you need, because you don't even know what type of developer you're going to need. Or you end up building the wrong thing entirely. So in your case, remember, if you're a non technical founder, if you're a business owner who is building a tech venture. Remember that Tech has a sequence. You have to follow the sequence. Pictures come before coding, feedback comes before building, testing comes before spending. So if you do the right thing in the wrong order. Basically, it stops being the right thing. This is why, in the tech one and technical founders program, we are very, very specific about which steps come when, if you follow the sequence, you get good results. If you don't follow the sequence, it is a waste of time. And. A huge, huge headache and a waste of money. Now I don't want you to think that. I want your strengths to vanish when you get into tech, because, you know, the things that made you successful, they are still wonderful. It's just these qualities. They need new rules. You need to harness your energy and your talent in a new way. And so these four patterns, they only hurt you when you apply them blindly without following a framework. But once you learn the sequence of building tech product, your business instinct, they become your superpower. So keep those instincts and get a framework. And if you want to learn this framework, if you want to learn the sequence, than January 2026 that is your time to join our tech for non technical founders program. It is the best program if you have an idea for a tech venture but no technical background, because in our program, you will get one on one coaching from extremely impressive world leading expert. You will also get lifetime access to our online content to help you build and scale your venture as a non technical founder, and also to help you fundraise, if that's what you want to do. So if you are thinking that next year, you know 2026 that's the year that I want to be, the year that I bring my tech venture to life, then get ready to join tech for non technical founders in January, that's when we are opening for enrollment. The best way to get notified when the program launches is to sign up to our free class. And the free class is called from business owner to tech founder, without the $100,000 developer disaster. The link to register is in the show notes, or just go to tech for non techies.co, forward slash January. That's tech fan on techies.co. Forward slash January. And now, my dear smart person, thank you so much for listening. Thank you very much for being with me today. Have a joyful day, and I'll be back in your wonderful smart years next week. Ciao.