ANALYSIS ESSAY ON
THE NON-TECHNICAL FOUNDER
BOOK WRITTEN BY JOSH MACDONALD
This analysis is based on the book The Non-technical Founder written by Josh MacDonald. The book is copyrighted 2018 by Josh MacDonald and was published by Morgan James in New York. The book cover was designed by Rachel Lopez while the interior was designed by Chris Treccan. It has the ISBN paperback of 9781683507578 and ISBN e-book of 9781683507604. The book has three parts with part one having three chapters, part two with eleven chapters and part three has twenty chapters.
The book The Non-technical founder was written by Josh MacDonald. MacDonald is well known has a serial software entrepreneur who has sold software built by him to over thousands individuals and many agencies over the world. He was 21-years old as at when he wrote this book. MacDonald started internet marketing when he was still a freshman in high school at age 14. Josh had his first project on online discussion and at age 16, he had his first 6-figure. Josh had worked with over 250 remote freelancers and had founded a number of successful ventures. He has his residence currently in Fort myers, florida.
This book is written to influence and guide everyone who has software’s building ideas and wants to succeed as a software entrepreneur who may not have any mentor to guide them in their quest. Josh grew up in a rural town that has shoddy internet connection and he has made it big as internet entrepreneur.
BODY OF THE BOOK ANALYSIS
Personally, I find this book to be well explanatory probably more than any book on business strategy I have read in the past. In part one, chapter one of this book as expected talks primarily on how to get your ideas together. People do have this misconception that the person with the best idea wins but this book has made it clear how you can execute your plan excellently and how to get it. The ideation stage of the chapter one has well explained strategy for keyword scout. Some of it are listening to friends, using of personal experience, reading industry news and forum, beating an existing option and one of the most important which is talking with younger generations. Getting your ideas validated and knowing if it fit for you were points I think Josh had talked so much about. In chapter two, he talked about how to validate your ideas. In my opinion, I think every point stated are the right things to do. Imagine yourself talking to your friends about your idea and when you execute the idea, you found out it was a flop. To avoid this, ask about the ideas from strangers, people you don’t know at all and don’t care about your success. Don’t get your ideas validated from friends as they might be partial in your favour. I also think MacDonald did well by giving the audiences tips to extra reading like where he had mentioned two books for extra reading. To get better understanding about what Josh was talking about on B2B validation, read up selling to big companies by Jill Konrath and selling to C – Suite by Nicholas A.C. Read and DR. Stephen Bistritz. He made mention of the checklist in chapter two where he had listed many questions you should ask yourself when you have an idea and have to validate it. In chapter three, he stated a quote which actually goes in line with the business strategy, the quote goes thus ‘’don’t let fear of failure hold you back but always consider your chances of success too’’. I think many people start business without weighing their options at all. Get to know if the business is fit for you. Like in chapter three, there are some questions you should ask yourself which I think josh really tried in explaining. Some questions like, does the revenue match your financial goals? Is the industry reasonable? How quickly can you bring your idea to market? Does the idea interest you? Daniel Gross said something about this. Daniel Gross is a business partner in Y combinator.
[When deciding whether or not to invest,] we look at both, [the team and the idea], but focus on the founders. Think of a ship crossing the ocean that just left port. It seems like it’s pointed in a good direction. Since they’ll have to make many adjustments along the way, we want to make sure the ship has a good captain as well.
Daniel Gross (Partner, Y Combinator).
In part two of this book, the reason and the basis of writing the book was stated by MacDonald as that you don’t have to be a programmer in other to be a software owner. In the word of Frank Van Mierlo, the founder of 1366 Technologies in part two of this book talked about how he had raised investments to fund his ideas.
So the first year I just worked by myself and I paid for everything, which was an easy thing to do because my first venture was tremendously successful and a lot of people made a lot of money at the end of that. Even my previous venture Bluefin, I started working 2 years with no pay. My story has always been, at the beginning of the venture, you just work for free. At some point you start paying people, but first you put together the team. I had the team of 10 people, who were willing to join but hadn’t joined yet. The only person working full time on the venture was me but the other people were waiting in the wings saying, “as soon as you have money, we will quit our jobs and join” and then we raised around $12 million and then almost everybody joined, except one guy who said he was going to join but wilfully did not join. Then we got started.
Frank van Mierlo
Founder, 1366 Technologies
Reading the words spoken by Frank, it gave the main purpose of part two of this book. Part two of this book talks basically on how to develop your software even without having any basic knowledge on programming. Supporting his points, MacDonald stated in chapter four of part two that there are two categories with very little exceptions in between. He made the clear differences between the two categories in which you raise investment for the start-ups to fund your idea or you work with your idea in many industries that need your services that is outsourcing. In the development stage of your software in which you know little or nothing about, you can find a co-founder. Finding a co-founder can be very difficult as explained by MacDonald. He went further giving clues how to get a co-founder which I think it really makes sense to me. In his statements, he had everything figured out by just telling you what to do if you read the book very well and understand what he was talking about. You just need to leverage your social networks, attend seminars that programmers also attends and make your way to the local college camps to talk with students studying computer science. Just like in Adam Draper quotes, go through your Rolodex. For those of you who don’t know what a Rolodex is because you were born after 1990, it’s like LinkedIn but on paper and only in your house. Go through your list of contacts and then reach out to people who might know people. You should know someone in your past who has built something. If your personal relationships don’t work, go to meet-ups focused around the general idea and you can generally meet people. If that doesn’t work, go to Angel List. But do all of these things, over and over until it works. If you take the time to do this, you will be successful. Adam Draper, Founder of Boost VC.
That what he said really happens as most founders known today actually know their co-founder through their contacts or friends at work place.
It was very brilliant of MacDonald to give alternative means if you could not get a co-founder. He himself is into solopreneur and experienced, so you wouldn’t expect anything less as he knows what advice to give. He gave the solopreneur checklist and it involves questions you should ask, how large is your idea? Do you have any experience? Do you know programming at all? These are questions which I actually think to be answered if you think you want to go solo. If you know nothing or less about programming, chapter five to chapter fourteen are things you should probably look into as explained by MacDonald. Chapter five which was talking about the integrator and the visionary combination. In the software development world, the visionary is the businessman who sells the software and the integrator is the guy who codes it. I would love to state that, MacDonald did well giving out a book (Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winter) as a very good example which was talking about the vital combination that powers many of the world biggest and most successful companies , the visionary and the integrator.
He had it cleared out in chapter six, ‘hiring cost’. If you are going to be building a software, you should have everything planned out like knowing the hiring cost as was explained by MacDonald in the book. Get to know if you are going to be paying the programmer hourly or fixed rate, prioritizing the task, dealing with programmers, hire a proof reader and this takes us to chapter seven having you list out how to source for hiring. There are places where you can source for hiring. In the book, MacDonald made list of some places which I think college students is the most reliable of all. Although I think fiverr and freelancer.com too are also good but I had still prefer college students because they actually know what you want better, if not even better than you. Jeff Meynard said something talking about picking an applicants.
The way it worked was Jeff Maynard and family decided that we would invest in this and so we became the investors to bankroll the company and created a couple of employees, including a CTO who was in the United States with me and Alice. What we elected to do was we selected a couple of development companies in the United States and we told them what it is we wanted and we did the same for two companies in Vietnam. After we did some research, my CTO was able to communicate effectively with them. And so we sat back and said, “okay, you guys got a couple of days each, uh give us your proposals” and the home grown guys, the development company here in the US, came back and said that can’t be done and the Vietnamese, one of the groups actually showed us a demonstration of it. So in terms of the capability, we found we could do a much better job and cheaper job, in the development using outsource than we could internally.
Jeff Maynard
President and CEO, Biometric Signature ID
If you read this well, you would understand that there are things to look into when picking an applicants. MacDonald gave some reviews on what he does whenever he wants to pick applicants. You can check the full explanation of the points in part two, chapter nine of the book. I will give the points he gave here which are reviews and work history, job success rate, skills, communication, Phone call and gut feeling. Another thing I would also like to talk about is the chapter fourteen where MacDonald had talked about ‘developing the miscellaneous’. The software actually contains more than the software, it also includes some miscellaneous like logo. As was mentioned in the book, MacDonald made mention of something which I actually think new business owners should consider in the software developing. ‘’You will need a logo. You can start with a cheap logo from Fiverr. I pay $5 or $10 for my starting logos. If the project is successful, I head over to
99Designs and pay around $300 for a better logo’’.
Going by the word of Frank van Mierlo, I have worked in business-to-business and my whole life has been business to- business and so you find customers by talking to people. You just go visit people. It’s just classic, old-fashioned sales. As a friend of mine says, “most problems can get solved in 50 phone calls or less.” Most of all there’s a willingness to climb on a plane and go visit people. Sales is a continuum and on one end you’re selling Boeing aircrafts and if you’re selling Boeing aircrafts then the president of the United States is going to help you close those sales because if you sell 20 Boeing aircrafts then it’s a huge amount of jobs for the country and it’s very important. The guy who ultimately closes the sale is the president of Boeing. You tend to sell to heads of state. That’s one extreme. The other extreme you’re selling toothpaste and you can’t do any customer contact because it’s like $3 for a tube of toothpaste or whatever it is. Then it’s all about marketing and it’s a completely different scenario, and so my business has always been a number of very large contracts. If you supplier with silicon wafers then they will sign a $700 million contract and for those things you fly to Germany and you go and meet those guys. Then they have a colleague elsewhere and you fly there and meet them and that’s how you do it.
Frank van Mierlo
Founder, 1366 Technologies
In part three of this book, which MacDonald has talked basically on the marketing. Getting to know ‘how to market your product’ is one thing and ‘building you product’ is another thing. He explained in chapter fifteen where he was talking about the website. He said, after the website has been built, which was actually explained in the early part of part two. I will advise you to follow the words of MacDonald in chapter fifteen of this book which says a paid wordpress theme makes your company look professional instead of amateur. It would have been bad of MacDonald if he had not included the resources for the wordpress but he actually did mention the theme forest and template monster. There are points which I would have talked about but MacDonald already did the part of the explanation and I think it was well understood. Some of the points are sales copy (get this on your website as the main the focus of any business website is the sales copy), understanding your audience, clear explanations (make it to be clear when writing the procedure on how to use the products or the terms and conditions of the software website), videos, reviews, testimonies and quotes (this was backed up by Richard Stumpf, As a music publisher, our “clients” are artists and writers. As in any company/ client relationship, it is all about trust. How do you develop that trust? Well, as you say, you have to start with a first. So that means you have to have enough knowledge and charisma to have someone “take a chance” on you to start. Once you do that and assuming you do a great job for the first client, in my business anyway, additional clients tend to come from word of mouth and the clients you target on your own often have links to you original few clients, so they then provide good references. Have a look at our testimonials page. That is a CRITICAL tool for us as a newer brand. I find so many people have so little time that a good word from a trusted source goes much further than cold calls or blind meetings. An example for me is that we’d have never been able to sign John Legend if will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas didn’t endorse us. EVERYONE was hunting John, and Will just said, “These guys are great. You should go there. I trust them.”
Richard Stumpf
Founder, Atlas Music Group).
This takes us to chapter sixteen which talked about the pricing. Personally, I think this is important in selling of software even in business, you would still need to determine the pricing and to do this, you really need to be careful. MacDonald pointed and clarify things in here like in the part where he was talking about payment processors which are the paypal, 2checkout, clickbank, bitcoin and some more. I think what he said about knowing which processor to choose should also be considered as there are some like 2checkout that actually give people get problem using them. In chapter nineteen, MacDonald also made the clear difference between the vendors and the affiliates. The vendors owns the products while the affiliates get the sales out. Another one thing is the media appearances (this he emphasizes on in chapter 32 of the book talking about guest posts, helping of a reporter out and television.) it would be nice to check those up to.
Conclusion of the Analysis
This book actually worth it. I won’t deny the fact that the book is very helpful for people that have ideas but do not know how to execute it, how to get ideas validated or people that do not have any idea on software programming. The non-technical founder is a book that teaches the in-depth of how ideas can be generated and executed perfectly.
As expected of the purpose of this book is to influence and guide everyone who has software’s building ideas and wants to succeed as a software entrepreneur who may not have any mentor to guide them in their quest. Josh grew up in a rural town that has shoddy internet connection and he has made it big as internet entrepreneur.
I personally had problem reading this book as it is too bulky to read and many unnecessary writing. There are parts where I think one or two founder interview is enough but they were too much and this actually pisses me off at a stage. Many individuals don’t have time to be reading bulky business book. It should have been very brief but I do commend Josh MacDonald for making the book well understood.