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You're a startup considering spending $25,000 on outsourcing product development to external developers. Is this a wise decision?
Well, Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, has a different opinion:
“You guys should be coding from the start. Web and mobile startups are so competitive right now. You have to assume that anything you’re doing, there’s a team of 2-4 dedicated, hardcore hackers working 24/7 on something extremely similar.”
He further says:
"If you have this iteration loop where you have to submit something to someone else and they have to come back to you. Then you’re like ‘no, it wasn’t quite right’ because a lot of stuff was lost in translation, you’re going to get 1-2 cycles per day at best. Meanwhile, that other team is getting 20 cycles per day. It has gotten so intense now that non-coding founders and startups are having a really difficult time adding value at these early stages."
Hmm, this sounds a familiar advice. Oh wait, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, echoes with a similar advice: “For a very long time, the classic co-founding team was one very strong business person and one very strong tech person… now it has shifted towards two really strong tech people. That works a lot of the time and may be better overall.” When you can build the product yourself, your iteration cycles become so much faster.
And talking about iteration cycles, Sam Altman gives a priceless advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: “The cycle here is basically: talk to customer to understand pain point → build product to address that → get product in front of user → see what they do → repeat cycle. This cycle is how you iterate and improve. The law of compound growth being what it is: if you can get 2% better every iteration cycle, your iteration cycle is every four hours rather than every four weeks, and you compound that over the course of a few years, you’ll be in a very very different place. Make it one of your top goals to build one of the fastest iterating companies the world has ever seen.”