Skills to Learn vs Outsource as a Founder

Amongst all circles of entrepreneurship I’ve interacted with, it appears mutually agreed upon that a founder needs to possess skills in selling, and to some degree even persuasion. But more specifically, a founder should probably also know methods of marketing and advertising to the extent they can at least gain customers and users for their product or service in a recurring fashion and at scale. If one is developing an organization that revolves around unique technology or techniques, they should likely know that niche and the method of producing said technology or technique.

In the beginning of a startup, founders often must learn everything themselves, whether to iterate quickly or simply because of funding constraints. As the business grows and many of these anchors subside, by what criteria does a founder decide between learning the skill versus mentally planning to just always pay someone who’s already an expert. I would argue that while I personally know printed circuit board (PCB) design, dedicating a notable amount of my time optimizing my new product’s PCB is not a good use of my founder time. This is especially true when it can be quickly done, with likely better results even, by a Chinese engineer for a very small dollar amount.

I undoubtedly could’ve given my product to a manufacturing company, either domestic or abroad, and paid some $20,000 - $50,000 to in 2-3 months time receive a fixed manufacturing design and process to mass manufacture my product. There is no industry-technical knowledge required here, but also no ability for me to evaluate the quality of the solution that I'm given. Under this regime, I have product back in-stock at 4 months maximum latency. This is what most founders and even the majority of large US consumer goods companies do. Or, I could spend 6 months of my life educating myself on manufacturing, coming to understand all of the major methods, techniques, and options to designing and building out a production process. I then have 7-8 months in-stock latency for this product, which is seriously a long time in the startup world. But with the next five products, I can achieve 1-2 month manufacturing latency with near zero cost. Eventually, you even teach this manufacturing design process to an employee or two. But at the scale of millions of dollars of revenue, what even is $50k? Insignificant really, so why waste three-fourths a year? I personally think this will be a useful skillset to have throughout my professional life, but is that justification enough?

I’d love to learn more about accounting, taxes, and legal financials but with growing company revenue and ChatGPT, is this really a good use of founder hours?

Funding One’s Personal Life as a Full-time Founder

Perhaps the most universal conundrum in the early-founder world is figuring out how to pay rent every month. For the founders who went through university, it is likely a great deal of your friends took a full-time position at a large company earning a comfortable living. I’ve met a number of early-stage founders who think (or thought) they could balance “an easy” full-time job and build their startup on the side. To no folly of theirs, they did balance full-time university and a startup pretty well. However, for reasons not fully clear to me, a job is just different. And ultimately, I have yet to ever see this path successful in the metric of growing a startup.

Another valid solution is raising enough equity-based funding to pay yourself a salary, although not always applicable or possible to everyone.

I’ve settled on the alternative of working a part-time jobs that supplements just enough income to eat but avoid the hourly commitment of daily mental exhaustion. However, this approach seems fairly uncommon because meaningful or technical part-time corporate roles are extremely rare.

What are others doing?

Tell HN: The Thoughts and Woes of a Full-Time Founder Part 2