Well, with any small business, everyone wears many hats. Now the problem with that is that it is impossible to do everything. If you’re read some of my other recent posts, you know that I’m struggling with that fact. I try to put in 3 hours or more every night after I work a full day at my consulting job, and put my toddler and infant to bed. I’m finding this isn’t even close to the time I want to be putting into my business.
Now the real question is priority. What is the most important? what is the best use of my time? Damn, I wish I had a better answer to this question, and I struggle with it daily. Part of the reason I still blog daily is just force myself to think. Of course, it’s also to cultivate more potential second customers, but it helps me work out my thoughts as well.
So, my dilemma, I’m a developer, and I’m the only developer in our software company. At the same time, I’ve been spending a lot of time learning marketing… but obviously, it’s not my specialty. Now, the challenge comes in that my partner is not a developer. He writes great specs, but doesn’t code. I’m also way ahead of him in my learning of marketing. All that being said, we are a team… so what matters most? the software or the marketing… I’m leaning toward the marketing, but at the same time, I have major development work to improve Rapier (not to mention the creation of our Field Service Engineer product).
So, I’d love to hear from anyone out there… is it better to hand off the marketing to my partner, even though I’ve been spending more time learning it and focus on development? or do I focus on getting the customers/sales, and then develop when it starts coming in?
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike
I’m going with somewhere in between.
I don’t think you can do a (successful) business without both pieces. More directly, I’d say getting the first product developed well is job #1 but after that it shifts over to the marketing / business side. Once that’s going well (enough), you can shift back and add features / expand the product line. If the development work is directly about making the product more marketable, then the lines get a little more blurry.
Bottom line though is something about ‘minimum viable product’ and testing the market with it before building out a huge … but not sell-able … product.
Seeing you go through this via the blog has been an interesting journey. What your doing requires a huge commitment, and your finding out other priorities get in the way of what you like to do.
The instinct is to do what your best at – in this case coding. Like any other business, you need to focus on what’s your strong point, understand the other stuff, and outsource the rest to other individuals to manage. For example, you know basic accounting and investment strategies….well enough to know if someone is BS’ing you right? But I’m pretty sure you hand off your books to a guy to take care of that for you – don’t you. You’ve realized that there is a cost to doing it yourself, and you can pay someone to do that for you at a lower rate.
I get that you don’t have a huge marketing budget, but have you thought about working with a local community college to help guide you and find you some interns to take on the challenge? A stay-at-home mom that wants to keep her skills up and have an active resume and reference when she re-enters the workforce when her kids grow up? Heck, there are probably MBA students that need to do a keystone project – maybe they can help you “outsource” some of your marketing and sales work and bring fresh ideas from folks that are inspired for different reasons then money.
Not saying it will be easy, but I think low-cost outsourcing marketing/lead generation will be a lot easier to finding a good accountant or programmer that will work for the “joy of it”.