Building Things Take Time!
One of the lessons that I learn big time in my entrepreneurship journey is that building things – ANYTHING – takes a lot of time – and I have a tendency to underestimate the time needed to build them.
Even the simplest of tasks take a hell of a time to implement. I was designing infographics last week (check them out here and here) and that seemingly simple task took me at least 3 hours to complete. In fact it’s slightly more than 3 hours after the further editing I did again later. I do not foresee how a professional designer can do what I did in a shorter period of time. Perhaps slightly less than 2 hours but do remember I have to search and select the data online and that should be included into the curation time. Putting it into perspective, that’s probably nearly half a working day just to come out with a simple infographic! The most I can do in a single day is 3 infographics and that doesn’t sound like a very efficient use of my time!
It’s the same for software development. Read this really great explanation on why software development task estimations are usually off by a factor of 2-3.
It helps that I do a little programming and am able to understand the process of software development though not perfectly yet. I am currently learning Python and soon with the help of Django will start making myself powerful in creating web applications. I just felt powerful a couple of weeks back when I used Python to download a whole year’s worth of TechCrunch 2011 source code by automatically browsing through the pages to analyse the popularity of certain keywords and to make some trends. The results are pretty predictive but that’s for another post.
I basically feel that any non-technical co-founder MUST need to have some basic knowledge on programming to communicate effectively with the CTO. Without such understanding, the co-founder will find it difficult to explain his concept and may have ridiculous expectations from the development team and may not understand certain problems the dev team may be facing. If you are a wannabe entrepreneur without any knowledge in programming, then my suggestion to you is start learning now! Learn HTML and CSS first then move on to understand what JavaScript, PHP, AJAX and SQL means.
