"Our product development was almost stalled for months on end."
Then you're doing something wrong.
I disagree. When we were fundraising we got no actual product development done, and from what I hear this is rather normal. "Months" may be a bit long, but they also launched around the time they raised, so combined with all the support emails (free products = lots of support...good reason to charge!) I can completely understand.
Our fundraising took around 6 weeks, I got nothing done. I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly. I'm convinced that was the right thing to do, since it seems to have gone well for us.
I can definitely see the benefit in the "code every day" mentality, but personally the extra context switch isn't worth it for me. I'm very conscious of when I'm not pushing new code and it physically pains me, so I keep tabs on it and never go more than a day or two without coding, but I don't make any hard-and-fast rules about my coding time.
> I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly.
... it sounds like you were following his later suggestion pretty much exactly. Also, paying down technical debt may not be sexy, but it's damned important.
You're right, but Martin already said his team was working on things like scaling as opposed to iterating on the product. I think that's what every startup needs to do post launch: harden up the quality of their product before pushing forward with new user-facing features.
I agree totally with your disagreement. I am not doing any fundraising, but we are negotiating a couple enterprise sales and I am handling all bug fixes/user support. I have hardly made any progress on planned features. It's just way too much dealing with people and constant email interruptions and trying to be innovative. I am also taking on the businessy stuff as well, while my gainfuly employeed co-founder is free to drop a couple hours a day on code. This is one of the strongest arguments for > 1 founder IMHO.
Our fundraising took around 6 weeks, I got nothing done. I tried to take on all the businessy things like support, so my cofounder could keep coding. He got work done, but it was mostly paying the technical debt we had accumulated when trying to launch quickly. I'm convinced that was the right thing to do, since it seems to have gone well for us.
I can definitely see the benefit in the "code every day" mentality, but personally the extra context switch isn't worth it for me. I'm very conscious of when I'm not pushing new code and it physically pains me, so I keep tabs on it and never go more than a day or two without coding, but I don't make any hard-and-fast rules about my coding time.