Why Should You Learn To Code if You’re A Non-Tech Startup Founder?

You certainly don’t have to know how to code to start a company, but it can definitely make life easier for you down the road if you do, according to a DevelopIntelligence story. Carefully considering your company’s needs and your ultimate goals can help you determine how much time and effort to invest in learning to code, but there is no question that you should at least learn the basics.

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At some point, Chan notes, you’ll have to learn to code, as you develop your business idea. You’ll definitely have to reach out to potential clients and validate your idea, but you’ll have to create a minimum viable product to test and get feedback at some point.

Furthermore, building an MVP will give you a leg up in recruiting a technical co-founder. Software developers are constantly bombarded by requests from large tech companies as well as startup founders with little to no technical knowledge. When you demonstrate that you believe in your product enough to learn to code yourself and to build a prototype, you’ll be more likely to get attention of the developer you want to hire,

Also, think about your company’s long-term goals and decide how much coding you need to learn. Do you want to become highly-skilled so that you can build a completely functional product? Perhaps you just want to put together a basic MVP so that you can hire the right CTO. Will learning to code help you analyze data or to market better? Even if you just want to handle the business and operations of your start-up, you never know where your business will be down the road, so learn at least a little bit of coding now.

So even if you have no coding skills now, it is a good idea to learn some before you head down the road too far in developing your business. You’ll have a solid appreciation for the work required to make your product a successful reality, and you’ll be better able to communicate with your users and engineering team later on if you know what it takes to actually build and develop the product.