Welcome to the Tech for Non-Techies podcast

The biggest difference between business to business and consumer facing ventures is how they grow. The growth curve and costs of B2B vs B2C growth is what surprises (and sinks) many start-ups.

Learning notes from this episode:

• Business to consumer start-ups growth through paid marketing. If you launch a consumer app on the Apple App Store, expect to pay around 40% of the money you raise on Facebook advertising.
• Business to business start-ups grow through sales. Sales is much more dependent on relationships and human interaction, than digital marketing. 
• In the early stages of a B2B start-up's life, the founder is usually the one doing sales outreach.
• Both approaches have serious costs. Do not make the mistakes that because marketing requires money and sales requires elbow grease, that sales is free. Always remember opportunity cost: if you are doing something, you are not doing something else.

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No code apps and outsourced product studios mean that there is more opportunity than ever for non-technical founders and traditional businesses to get into tech and succeed.

But, as more companies enter the market, they’ll be competing for a finite resource: our attention.

Listen to this episode how to make the most of this opportunity and avoid costly mistakes.

Learning notes:

• The prevalence of No Code apps and outsourced product studios is driving down the cost of building apps, sites and algorithms.
• As more tech products enter the market, marketing costs will increase. This means a boon for Facebook and Google, and also for professionals who know how to attract and engage new users.
• Jobs that will benefit from this boom include User Experience designers, who know how to make habit forming products, Community Managers and Strategic Partnerships experts. None of these roles require coding, but they all require an understanding of how tech products get built and who does what...

Why do some products go viral and others die a quiet death? The answer lies in growth hacking. 

Growth hacking is a type of marketing that combines working on the product, which is an inside job, and working on promotion, which is an outside job. It is a new discipline born with the tech sector, and growing in popularity today.

Learning notes from this episode:

• The Dropbox growth hacking case study is still seen as the Holy Grail in the sector. The team created a double referral program to grow 3900% in just 15 months.

• A growth hacking effort is always done by a multi-disciplinary team, and will often involve a product manager, a designer, a community manager, engineers, someone with a marketing or PR background, and maybe a data scientist.

• Traditional marketing is outside facing: billboards, TV ads and articles in the press.  Growth hacking is different because it looks at the inside of the product, and adjusts it to grow users and revenue.

• PR...

It's so tempting to dive into making a product the moment you have an idea. But, this is a sure way to lose time and money.

Before speaking to developers or designers, take a deep dive into the users and the problem you are aiming to solve. This is an ideal opportunity for non-techies to shine: user research and idea validation.

Listen to this episode to learn from Ronan Walsh, founder of Digital Trawler, a digital marketing agency, about how he helps his SaaS clients create better products.

Learning notes from this episode:

• A product is a solution to a people problem. Before even contacting a product team, take time to investigate the people and the problem.
• Marketers and designers go through a very similar process to validate the user problem at the start. This is because both are very user focussed.
• User research is done in two ways: quantitative and qualitative. For qualitative research be careful not to use steering questions to feed answers to the research...