Evan Carmichael advises non-technical founders not to learn to code unless they're passionate about it. Instead, find a technical co-founder or hire help. He met his collaborator Jason at a Toronto entrepreneurship event and says investors won't fund tech companies without technical credibility.
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How to make a website if you don't know anything about websites. Okay, if you're starting a business and you don't know about the product category that you're getting into, you have to find a way to either learn it yourself or better yet, bring people on board who can help you. Okay, this comes as a response to a question I got from one of my YouTube viewers, Jim Jones, who wrote in to say, I have a question. I want to make a microblogging site. My target market is age 14 and above. I'm currently struggling to find the funding and right people to help me realize this dream, as unfortunately I'm not a programmer. What do I do? So Jim, here's the thing, okay? If you want to have a lot of success in this field, it's probably not going to be by you becoming a programmer, okay? That, that might help, but if you're not interested in programming, if you're not passionate about being a programmer, It's not going to work. It's going to be a mediocre product. So you got to think, what are you really good at? And then bring people on board who can support you. The two ways to do it here, if you're building a technology product, you need to have somebody on board who gets technology. That's a big thing. That's kind of a big deal, right? So you have to find that person. The two ways to do it is one, you hire them, and at a startup you don't have a lot of money to do it. Right? If you've got tons of backing, that's one thing, but you probably don't have a ton of cash. Most of the best startups in the technology space were started by people who get technology. So you need to find the person who gets technology to guide you along the way here. The way to do it is find someone who you can partner up with. Find someone who believes the same thing that you believe in, but doesn't have your skills. They have the technology skills, they want to build the exact same thing, but they have no idea how to build a company and how to market this. That's where you come in, hopefully. I don't know where you come in. You got to tell me what you're good at. Hopefully you're good at something that relates to this. And go find that person. How do you find that person? You have to hang around in the circles that relate to what you're talking about. So here's an example. Let me bring this home for you in a tangible example, okay? I've got a guy who's helping me now on my team named Jason, and Jason has done a lot of great work on the branding, the design, a lot of the thinking behind the business and the website, and taking it in a direction that I wasn't thinking of before and I didn't have the skills for. How did I find Jason? Okay, there was an event here in Toronto that I created, a coffee shop that I really liked, A bus ran into that coffee shop and the owner had to close down for a few days. Can you imagine a bus hitting your store? Like, it's hard enough to be an entrepreneur and here comes this bus that plows through your front door. So they had to shut down while they built the front of their store back up. And when they opened up again, I put out a note to my newsletter list to say, hey guys, here's what happened to this store. Little Nickys. I want to go surprise them one day and just buy their stuff, grab some coffee, meet you entrepreneurs and talk business and support this entrepreneur. Why did I do this? Because I believe in entrepreneurs. That's what I do. I love entrepreneurs. Everything I do is about entrepreneurship, and the people on my team have to love entrepreneurs too. So when I went to that event, I met Jason there. It's the first time I met him in person, and we, we hit it off, and nothing happened right away. We didn't have an idea to work together on something right away, but over time things developed and we hit it off, and it worked well because we believed in the same thing, but we had different skill sets, and we found each other by going to events that related to what we believed in. So this thing that you're trying to build, who's Who's it going to help? How is it going to help them? Why is this important? Like, this has to mean something to you. And start going to events or create your own event that relate to that topic. If it was around entrepreneurship for me, I would create an entrepreneurship event. I would go to any entrepreneur event here in my city or conference that I wanted to learn about. I would go there because the people there, they like the same thing. They believe in the same thing that I do, but they have different skills, and that means partnership opportunities. Okay, you got to find that person. If you want to build a successful technology-based company, you need somebody who gets technology. You're not going to get funding without that person. You said you're trying to get funded, you go to banks, you go to investors, you go to angels, VCs, whoever it is, nobody's going to give you money if you're a technology company without the technology person. So you either have to find that person or take your company in a different direction that doesn't rely on technology where you can use your strengths and you don't need the partners. Those are your options. Great question. Believe. For those of you watching, if you like the video, give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more. And let me know what you think. Leave a comment below. If you have a question, put it below. I'll make a video response. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
