Great write up. This is how I built my company, Just Add Content (http://justaddcontent.com), all on open source. Sure, it's no Dropbox but it's doing some pretty neat things. For example, it'll have front-end editing in the next few weeks, which makes content management incredibly easy.
This strategy was my only option. My BA is in Psychology and my MS is in Finance. I'm 29 and I spent the last 8 years in the Marine Corps (just got out in October as a Captain). I had no technical background, but on my last 12-month deployment to Afghanistan (returned in April 2013) I spent my free time building the first version on a $300 duct-taped laptop while teaching myself to code. For me it was a mental escape. I was on a small Marine advisor team living with Afghans. So sure, it's not revolutionary, but I did the best I could with what I had. And to this day I'm still a self-funded single founder and my costs are so low that even if I never got another customer I can stay alive indefinitely. I even have investment and acquisition interest from some companies in the space. Luckily I'm in the financial position to turn it down to keep focusing on my long-term vision.
When I started working on this in early 2012 I never imagined it'd be this hard, but I also never imagined I'd get this far. Even two years later I absolutely love it every day. I'm still passionate about the industry and have massive plans for the future. I want to change the way small businesses work and how they use websites. And look how it all started, just some dumb Marine that had an idea in 2012 a few weeks before deploying to Afghanistan for a year.
I enjoy reading this comment and can feel your enthusiasm. I was too in the Navy years ago and ended up coding when I had free time in the machine shop (enlisted ;)). People look at me like alien and thought I was some kind of genius... lolz
This wont work for tech focused startups. Google could never exist without writing a single line of code. Nor could Dropbox. etc...
Yeah maybe a retail/ecommerce website sticky taped using off the shelf parts with glue, but definitely no tech startup. A landing page offering something which isn't built yet might also work using wordpress et al. However you still need some tech knowledge to get this setup.
Being in a position to build an idea is a lot more powerful then raving on about not needing to write code to build a startup. For those that have read Founders at Work will know that ideas change. This means iterations. Many many iterations. Very fast. Testing the waters with a MVP... usually that requires writing code. Unless of course you want to move slow then yeah don't write code and hope for the best with the glue.
Didn't dropbox start life as a slide deck on Drew Houston's laptop until he got matched up with some (very skilled) programmers from MIT? I seem to remember him pitching it before he even had a tech team assembled.
Drew Houston coded the first version by himself. From http://www.wired.com/business/2013/09/dropbox-2/ - "Houston started coding a version of what would become Dropbox’s signature folder, the portal to an app that magically holds and syncs the same files on every computer and mobile device where you install it...."
> They're getting their first customers with minimal technology, and often no code at all. Instead of building fancy technology from the outset, they're hacking together inexpensive online tools such as online forms, drag-and-drop site builders, advanced Wordpress plugins, and eCommerce providers.
In order to hack together inexpensive tools and make your website look decent, guess what, you need to KNOW a couple of things such as HTML/CSS/PHP (wordpress) or Ruby (octopress), Python (Django) or whatever.
The examples described offer kind of services that can be build with wordpress plugins right? Okay, but even to make these plugin work properly together, you need at some point someone who knows how to write code.
Knowing how to write code, is a standard knowledge for startups, because is what turns ideas into products taking away one of the biggest expense: Development. If you have enough money, or investors you could outsource that, but for me makes not much sense. Being leader and developer at the same time, gives you a unique view top-down and down-top of your product. You can understand the dynamics of the entire operation.
Even with two technical co-founders (we're both developers), we're still following this strategy with Lambda (http://getlambda.com). With the exception of our homepage (which is a Jekyll site), we haven't written any code and don't have any immediate plans to start coding either. We've been able to bring in >100k in sales in one month and expect to be able clear over a million next year.
We've discussed some ideas we could start developing, but in each case, we've always been able to come up with a quicker/cheaper way to test the relevant concept without development work. Sticking to a "no code" strategy has been a good way to focus our efforts on activities that actually matter. We both like to code and would probably be happier spending a week hacking instead of taking sales calls, but the latter is more important to our company right now.
Just because you can write code doesn't mean you have to.
Looks like a good business and if you are able to bring in that many sales it looks like an excellent business.
How do you find your consultants and your customers?
I'd guess:
consultants: hackathons, personal network,
customers: personal network, conferences
That's right for the customers side: it's a lot of personal networking and referrals.
For consultants, we've had a lot of resonance with various social media channels. It's really nothing fancy or surprising, just making a consistent effort to engage with various communities (like HN) has been fantastic.
I think the right balance is to at least have some kind of prototype to show off. The initial phase of "not having to write code" is pretty short. You are more likely to figure out who are the customers and who are not. You will also exhaust all options to get email / signup quickly... If you spend way more time into this phase and still don't want to write code, you will start losing people's interest. So when I said the "right balance" is to code in 2-weeks timeframe. That's what my buddy and I did with this TV social site with show casts/celebrities http://www.tivify.com/. It is something raw, brutal but works!! We at least could take it to Meetup and show off to people. That's easier to sell than slidedeck or launchpage.
This strategy was my only option. My BA is in Psychology and my MS is in Finance. I'm 29 and I spent the last 8 years in the Marine Corps (just got out in October as a Captain). I had no technical background, but on my last 12-month deployment to Afghanistan (returned in April 2013) I spent my free time building the first version on a $300 duct-taped laptop while teaching myself to code. For me it was a mental escape. I was on a small Marine advisor team living with Afghans. So sure, it's not revolutionary, but I did the best I could with what I had. And to this day I'm still a self-funded single founder and my costs are so low that even if I never got another customer I can stay alive indefinitely. I even have investment and acquisition interest from some companies in the space. Luckily I'm in the financial position to turn it down to keep focusing on my long-term vision.
When I started working on this in early 2012 I never imagined it'd be this hard, but I also never imagined I'd get this far. Even two years later I absolutely love it every day. I'm still passionate about the industry and have massive plans for the future. I want to change the way small businesses work and how they use websites. And look how it all started, just some dumb Marine that had an idea in 2012 a few weeks before deploying to Afghanistan for a year.