the goose

I was talking to a pretty technical friend of mine a couple of nights ago.  He was all aglow after coming up with a killer application idea for the iphone.  This guy is smart.  He runs a successful company and has raised funding the past.  Yet, he makes the same mistake I do, you may do, and pretty much any technical person does.  He thinks

technology > design > marketing > market

in that order.  When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and nerds love hammers.  I liked the idea of building a Spanglish button for Firefox of a Irish Twitter SMS gateway.  The idea and challenge of getting it to work is so entoxicating that you just can’t wait to jump up and get started.

We’re handicapped by the fact that we can run off and start building things.  We don’t have to pay someone else to do it.  As such, we don’t value our own time and make an honest judgement on whether it is worth the investment.

That is all fine and well if fudging around with stuff in your spare time but there is a real opportunity cost.  Rob on Software’s excellent post on the correct order to come up with opportunities

market > marketing > design > technology

While we may consider our technical ability to be an advantage, it is actually our biggest handicap.  Outsourcing might not be as much fun as coding it up yourself, but it does force you to stop and think about whether its a runner.  If you had to spend your own hard earned cash on something – would you still do it.  I’d argue that maybe you should fire yourself as CTO if you ever really want to get over your technical handicap.