Naval Ravikant explains why startup founders should be able to code

Naval Ravikant gave the following advice to a startup spending $25k outsourcing product development to external developers:

“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 continues:

“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.”

Full video: Forbes “Start-Ups: Don't Outsource Coding“ (Mar 2011)

More popular advice from Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant on why founders shouldn’t chase trends “The thing that is always the best to do is something that you know really well and have conviction about. Usually it’s that you’ve worked on a product because you want it to exist for yourself or it’s an industry that you know really well or there’s some technology that other people don’t get but you’re intellectually obsessed with.” (full article).

Naval Ravikant: Try to be one of the people who creates things “You should actually go out and build the thing you want to see exist—not just say ‘oh, that’s gonna happen. I’m just going to sit back and wait for somebody else to do it.’” (full article).

Naval Ravikant’s advice to startup founders: “Stay small until you’ve figured out what’s working" “Stay small until you’ve figured out what’s working. Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford and started Epiphany among many other companies, defines a startup very nicely. He says a startup is a search for a scalable and repeatable business model. And so what you’re really doing is you’re searching, and until you’ve found that business model that you can repeat and you can scale, you should stay very, very small and very, very cheap.” (full article).