In one of my recent calls with my advisory board, one of the advisor posed this rhetorical question me:
are you a nerd or are you a CEO?
We were discussing about the UX and UI design of my new micro-SaaS application.
We tried to hire a UI/UX designer and developer from Upwork for 200 USD, with very poor results delivered in the span of two weeks. After asking for a refund, I decided to have a go at creating the screens of the application myself, with Figma; which I never ever touched until that day. Oh, and did I mention I am neither a designer nor a frontend developer?
Anyway, being in Founder Mode, I manage to learn Figma and create few screens in a single weekend.
I felt really motivated while working on it, and I was very proud of my achievement. Armed with the felling of fighter winning his match as the underdog, and expecting a standing ovation from my advisors during our call, I gradually lost my confidence when I asked for their feedback: “So, what do you guys think?”
“Yeah no, we appreciate that you spent your weekend learning a new tool and creating the screens. They look ok… but are you a nerd or a CEO?”. He continues: “because your job is to enable other people to do their work, not thinker with things”.
I knew he had a point. I should not spend time doing a job which I dont have any experience in to begin with. But I was so inspired and motivated in learning a new thing!
Also, from my point of view I was solving a problem which, I think, it is something CEOs do. We had fired our designer, the budget to hire a proper one is non-existent, and if we were to rely to our full stack dev for the implementation, at least he would have had a proper reference.
Overall, I still think that having a stab at Figma myself has been a net positive. I understood more how I want my design to be; it made me more aware of the design process and the some of the basics to create a good looking page. And, as I thought, it sped up the specification of requirements to give to our dev for the UI implementation.
But this isn’t the only time I had to tinker with the tech stack instead of planning/executing or whatever CEOs do. And I am sure it wont be the last. That is because for the past 11 years working as a data professional, for me work has always been associated with some “tangible” output. A dashboard, a presentation about the model performance, updates about the deployment of a data pipeline. That, and also I am always excited to learn new things.
Just planning, or thinking, or writing some emails, doesn’t feel like work to me.
For now, as we are still very early stage, I can get away with a bit of tinkering. And I actually think that is an advantage when being the only full time person working on a microSaaS:
You can communicate more clearly with an hired developer, If you have any.
You can pick up any tech related skill quicker, keeping the budget needed to build the solution low.
You know how the sausage is really made, i.e. you don’t need to rely to a third party telling you how things may or may not work.
If a customer has a problem, you can quickly triage it and maybe even solve it, without waiting when your freelance developer has time for you.
You can better answer question from your Investors Board, if you have any.
I am sure there are many more. But the more the startup grows, the more being technical will work against you, I believe, as the most of the energy must be spent on marketing and sales.