Why You Should Have a Non-Technical Business Partner

If you are a micro-ISV, you should have a non-technical business partner.

Accountability, Motivation and Focus are certainly over-used words, yet are also hurdles that most likely trip up most technical minded programmers turned business owners. Those with the interest and technical aptitude to design and develop programs will find the design and development tasks easy.

To turn the product created from those efforts into a viable business takes a level of accountability, focus, and motivation that is not expected of the typical programmer in the corporate world.

Working solo you are more likely to lose motivation and lose focus of the business side as more interesting technical challenges present themselves.

Always remember that the level of technical interest and challenge a task holds is not correlated to the business value of that task. As a technical developer turned business owner, your job is to focus on the business first – technical interest and development second.

Working with a non-technical business partner or partners, you are accountable to a person (or people) that have less interest in hearing that your accomplishment for the day was very technically exciting but did nothing to move toward completion of an important new feature.

For me, my non-technical business partner is my wife. Her and I are managing members of the LLC. While I am working in the office to complete a new feature, she is taking care of other business activities including keeping the books, marketing, industry research. If I can show her a brand new feature at the end of the day, I will feel a double sense of accomplishment. This gives me motivation and focus. So I had better stop writing and get working.