Ask HN: What's a Non-Programmer to do?

I have your role. Here's what keeps me busy:<p>1. Writing the copy for the website. Mainly keeping the support documents up-to-date.<p>2. Doing all the business related tasks.<p>3. Doing all the customer service.<p>4. Handling all incoming e-mail.<p>5. Doing all of the social networking stuff (facebook, twitter).<p>6. Doing all of our marketing. Handling Google AdWords, banner advertising, text advertising, etc.<p>7. Dealing exclusively with our accountant.<p>8. Tracking all of our expenses, etc., into Excel and getting everything ready for accountant (see 7).<p>9. Handling all legal work with our lawyer.<p>10. Doing all of our networking. I'm the guy that goes to all of our relevant events.<p>11. We all come up with ideas for product development.<p>12. Blogging. I do all the blogging.<p>13. Handling payroll. I do that.<p>14. Dealing with the bank accounts. I deal directly with the small business rep at our bank.<p>15. Market research. I find out as much as I can about our competitors, what they do, etc. I also learn about our market as a whole.<p>16. Handling all incoming advertising requests, setting up their campaigns, etc.<p>17. Dealing directly with all our merchants (credit cards + PayPal). Dealing with the very few chargebacks we receive.<p>18. Paying all of our bills (server expenses, software licenses, domains, advertising, etc.) and monitoring our cash flow.<p>19. Pitching. I handle all of that.<p>20. Anything that requires a phone call. Incoming or outgoing.<p>...and many other tasks as they crop up. For example, I'm the point person on setting up our new office.<p>My job is a lot more "flexible" so I can deal with things as they arise and take the lead. Whereas my partners (one is a designer and one is a coder) usually have to stay on task so they're not distracted. For example, we're setting up a new office as I mentioned above and it's just not feasible for either to spend time dealing with that in the middle of production. I, however, can do that.

Here are some ideas:<p>1) Make phone calls to the competition, pretend to be a customer, listen to their sales pitch, and see if there is anything your company can gain from the experience.<p>2) Have the geeks setup a CMS and designate yourself the webmaster. You get a job title with master in the name which is kind of cool. Use some of your time to maintain your companies presence and give it a voice.<p>3) Become the social media guy for your company, someone needs to be manning the Twitter, Facebook, Frappr, Blfousajf, and whatever else folks use now. This is very time consuming but if you have time, do it. (at least I perceive it as time consuming)<p>4) Read the Startup Guide to Guerrilla Marketing and start doing that stuff.<p>5) Network--become the networking guy. Search for events in your area on meetup.com and other places. Get involved. Find out about different opportunities to get more free cash, chase these opportunities.<p>This is my wishlist of stuff I'd have someone do if I had them.<p>It's all about finding your niche based on what's missing. I wouldn't expect the cofounders to always be the one throwing tasks at you. They're stuck in the weeds doing the product.<p>Maybe take some time, read books, and try to become the big picture guy related to what you're doing and look for small ways to move that forward.

I don't know what a full-time business person is supposed to do at a webapp which teaches Chinese. What were you anticipating?<p>Here's my suggestion: forget "traditional" marketing. You're now Head of SEO. Don't worry if you're totally incompetent at it, most professional SEOs are, too. Set yourself a goal for the end of this year: I am going to learn SEO, and I am going to quintuple the traffic Skritter receives from Google, and I am going to lift our front page to trial conversion by 25%.<p>Then, that is your full time job. Trust me, you will be able to continually generate value for the business.<p>(I originally typed "fill the time", then I smacked myself. Filling the time is a self-destructive, useless way to look at working. Don't <i>feel</i> productive, <i>be</i> productive, and then <i>go home</i>. And tell your coders that, too.)<p>P.S. Let me get you started on lifting the front page conversion -- that huge, ginormous, eye-catching animated thing on your front page? That is getting clicked, I can guarantee it. It is probably being clicked more than every other element on that page put together.<p>Install CrazyEgg if you don't believe me.<p>That should be linked to whichever of sign up and try now generates more business value.

There are a million non-programming things to do in a startup.<p>* Talk to schools/teachers to get them to try your software - especially study abroad programs.<p>* Reach out to Chinese community centers<p>* Write. Write for your blog, guest blog. Do everything you can to find people in your target audience.<p>* Learn SEO. Hunt down and win your keywords. This only takes time.<p>You don't have money for traditional marketing. And you are worried about having too much time. Fortunately non-traditional marketing takes much more time than money.

1) Find Deals - Find people who can resell what you have, promote what you have, etc. That's bizdev and sales.<p>2) Track any keyword possibly relating to you on Twitter, Google Blog Search, etc, and join in the conversation wherever you can without looking smarmy.<p>3) Design A/B tests. You sound geeky enough to change headlines, swap out images, etc. Figure out Google Analytics and Google Site Optimizer and start squeezing percentage points out of your funnel.<p>4) Blog and Tweet. Be a social media god.<p>5) Grok SEO. 95% of the work around SEO is linkbuilding. with low margins, SEO is your friend. Be amazing at it.<p>6) Go to conferences that might be appropriate (see #1).<p>7) SEM. Find google keywords you can buy and convert enough to justify the expense. Adwords is hard, but if you can optimize your way to a good ROI, it's gold. If necessary, find long tail keywords (I know companies that bid the minimum on 750,000 keywords and make a killing). Adwords is all about a conversion funnel-- plenty to learn there.<p>Your job is revenue enhancement. That means you have to live and breath your sales funnel. Acquisition, conversion, retention, virality. Make 5 cold phone calls a day to potential partners/resellers and then get busy testing/optimizing your funnel. (I actually did a presentation on this for a local startup group: Post and slides here: <a href="http://www.tonywright.com/2009/software-and-making-money-presentation-slides-included/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tonywright.com/2009/software-and-making-money-pre...</a> )<p>If you can't make a full-time job out of building revenue for your company, go part time and negotiate a fair slice (15%?) for your P/T participation. But the above is enough non-menial work for 2-3 people.

I looked at your homepage and said out loud, "that is cool!"... great idea.<p>I think there's two main things you should focus on: 1. Working on business relationships (networking, finding potential partners or customers, customer support, etc.)<p>2. Miscellaneous busy work related to programming. A lot of the work involved in programming can be done by someone who can't program, if you're decently technical. Examples: Testing/QA (help maintain a bug list), research and compilation (finding or creating relevant databases or lists), seeking relevant forums online and posting to them, etc.<p>Also, you say that traditional marketing isn't going to have a positive ROI. You need to figure out what IS going to have a good ROI, and work on that!<p>Two suggestions about your website:<p>1. You need a pricing page on your website... I can't figure out how much your service costs after the free trial.<p>2. I'm glad you mention that any input device, such as a pen tablet, can be used. I think you should offer a page of suggested devices (and links to buy them -- get commission if you can) because it seems like that kind of investment is a no-brainer for someone who is serious about learning Chinese. Skype does/did that because Skype works much better for people with a good headset microphone. Similarly, someone is going to learn to write Chinese better if they can actually use a pen-like device while practicing.

"businesser" people can do marketing and user support. use google and twitter search to find people looking for what your product does, but don't know about your particular product. reply to them personally and try not to sound too spammy.<p>same for user support. reach out to your current users and find out what they like and don't like. gather feedback to deliver to your more techy partners who can do the actual implementation.

Market your product using videos. Decent video production is hard to do, and takes a lot of time, but Google places relevant videos at the top of certain searches. It's easier to get on the first page of a video search than it is on the first page of a regular Google search.<p>Blog, blog, blog, blog. Google primarily indexes text for it's search. The more fresh, well written, original content the better. That being said, it will take months before you start to see that have a solid effect on your bottom line.<p>Find each and every single forum devoted to learning Chinese. Become a member on those forums and interact heavily. Build credibility on those sites by providing valuable interaction, and then feel free to post appropriate links to your software. A lot of forums let you have a link to your site in your sig. That can only help you in the long run. <i></i>* disclaimer <i></i>* I'm not suggesting spaming, I'm suggesting good, solid interaction. Geeks don't really use them that often, but normal people use forums quite a bit, and Google loves to index forums.<p>Connections. Email anyone and everyone that might be interested in your product. Develop relationships with people interested in learning Chinese. Find cross marketing opportunities. Read some business and marketing books, take those ideas and run with them.<p>Become a sales expert. Start reading books like crazy on sales and marketing. Your technical co founders are going to be working like crazy to get the software side of things up and running. Every idea that you can bring to the table is going to help them out, and make your product better.<p>Study usability like crazy. A lot of times, technical people can get really wrapped up in making something work. They can often get too close to the product to be able to see it objectively and relate to how a customer uses their product. They need to know what problems the customers are having with their products, and what is confusing to them. Help them do that.<p>Do usability studies. Find friends and neighbors that have never used your product, and get screen captures of them using your product, and video their facial interactions with them using your product. Meetup.com does this for every new iteration of their product.<p>Find new uses for Mechanical Turk with your product. You can do some amazing things with Mechanical Turk and a little HTML knowledge. Have Turkers test one or two specific aspects of your software, and get their feedback. Pass that on to your engineers. Manage A/B testing through Mechanical Turk.

On a side note, I couldn't find how much your service costs, so I'm going to assume that I can't afford it.

In a way, you're in a great position in which you can make a real difference to your business. While your partners have to go on every day with the same programming tasks, not always able to see how they make a difference in the immediate term, you get to wake up every day, consider what's the best thing to do right now to advance the business ... and do it. Sometimes it will mean working on funding, other times it will mean filling different roles for which you're not yet ready to hire an extra person (marketing, sales, user support). Sometimes it might even mean just getting out of the way and making life easier for the developers (someone needs to cook those ramen - make sure they're delicious).<p>I think the main problem you have (I can only imagine, I was never in that position myself) is that you need to remain very confident that you're pulling your weight. Do that by deciding to not worry about the division of labour and simply doing the absolute best you can all the time.

Your role is to figure out who wants to buy your product, and how your product can be more like what they want to buy. Hint: If you're not rich yet, you haven't answered this question correctly.<p>What's your story? Are you selling Chinese characters, or are you selling worldliness and adventure? Or time-saving? Or maybe profitability due to Chinese-reading employees? Hint: you started this as college students learning characters and thinking about ninjas. College students are poor. Business people who want the fastest way to learn something that makes them rich, are rich.<p>You need to be watching LOTS of other people use the product, and thinking every minute of every day about why your Skritter is actually a totally essential part of their lives. Hint: this means you're almost never in the office. So it's your job to find out what that is, and fix it.<p>Finally: Can I use it on an airplane? Language products that I can't use intensively on a flight to the country in question are a waste of time.

I think this is a phase all startups go through. Initially there are several roles, tech, business development and planning (project management).<p>During the execution phase the focus will shift, temporarily to tech and project management. But once you really start to take off business development comes back to the top, and if you play your cards right as a company it will stay that way, pretty much forever.<p>How long that phase starts is up to you, I'd use my 'idle hands' to get busy making as many contacts as you can with potential gateways to large number of users as well as the press. Eventually that will morph into a business development department, but right now that should be your role.<p>An important side effect of performing this function is to keep the tech department up to date with a steady stream of customer - and would be customer - feedback.

I really like that website! I've had two pushed to learn Chinese which both failed. I think I will try Skritter for #3.<p>I coded in the very early days of my website and moved to the business side as we grew. Other HN users have posted big lists of good stuff. I want to say that you really have two big goals based on those lists:<p>1. Keep ONLY user feedback flowing to the coders and handle anything else that would otherwise fall to them. They are the engine of your company; respect that by keeping them healthy, focused and productive.<p>2. Find the next big source of growth for your company. As the business guy, although coders often contribute, this is really on you.<p>I've played around with the bulk of lists others have written in answer to your post. Here are the time intensive, low cash things that have worked for us:<p>a. SEO. The cheap place to start is long tail keywords that are highly targeted to your service. Make sure your H tags and falling paragraph content align with the terms you want. After that, you'll need inbound links from non-spammy website. $100 a month can from textlinkads can help. If you are too poor for that, you'll need to convince bloggers to write about you - and to use those long tail keywords. Hard but possible.<p>b. Newsletters. These are surprisingly effective, but they are also time consuming and require a "I am going to work this hard for 3 months" approach to gauge true results. There are a wide range of email service providers, from ConstantContact on up. Many will let you send a few freebies out, others will let you send always free under a certain limit. This is great if you have a small list. Shop around, call the owner of one, explain your situation and negotiate for a little more head room. Remember, they make money on volume, so if they can show you ROI free early, they'll win too.<p>My parting advice is, dig in. Give whatever you decide to try your full effort. At the start it will feel frustrating and ineffective. Let it snow ball. Come in with the mindset that "this will work" and "I will not let my company down by failing to make this work". Then it will.

Outreach and business development. I'm actually learning Chinese, so hearing about your site here was very useful for me and I just checked on chinese-forums.com (my other recent discovery) to see if the folks there have heard of you and what they think and I see that you've posted there and received good feedback. So I think you're on the right track. Have you looked at partnerships with other operations like italki, livemocha and chinesepod?

It's fabulous to have someone around who takes the noise away from projects so that I can focus on writing code, and since that's what I love to do I'll happily do it for 60 hours a week. I'm near the end of a three week holiday, and the two most relaxing days were the ones where I just sat down and hacked away on personal projects, without having to try and steer colleagues to good practice or deal with customers or deal with management or write project plans.

Well, I am just starting with YC and I just came up with a product. None of us, are programmers. At first, I wasn't looking for funding meant for software. Our product doesn't have to be software. I started to count myself out of the YC. But then I realized that my product can be in the form of software. So I am designing the software, but I am going to contract someone to write it. But it's a little more complicated that CS, so I have to contract everything technical. I don't feel bad about it. If I want to I can learn it, if need be. I don't have a degree, but my potential co- founders have a PHD and Masters, but they say I'm the genius.<p>I have taught myself everything online. HTML website design and a little flash and I play with digital 3D animation. I design every site I own. People pay me to design websites and I didn't finish school. Even in school my major was Mass Communications and Journalism, later Music Theater.<p>So, you are and economics major. That's awesome and very important after the product is finished. You will know how to market it to the economy, among other things you know.<p>You feel left out with the CS crew? I use to feel left out to every educated friend I have. But my abilities exceed paper and yours really exceeds your degree.<p>Keep your head up.

My business partner had this problem too and sold it. Once he stopped designing the site and explaining its features to me, he did SEO/SEM, paid Indians to bring up tiny sites doing tiny functions, did bug testing for me, and did all the marketing. Now he's bootstrapping with the other sites in order to bring in more cash for the marketing of our co-produced website.

Wow! Damn that's a cool website.<p>Sorry I don't have anything useful to add, just saying I wish I had that site around back when I was learning Chinese.

Mind if I asked a similar question, but in a quite different context?<p>So I'm working for an outsourcing startup which provides development services for startups. We're doing Agile development on RoR.<p>My eventual role would be a scrum master but my college major was international business. No SC background whatsoever.<p>At the moment I'm still in training and playing a role of a "front-end developer" in which I do all the HTML markup and CSS design in HAML and SASS.<p>My pair is a coder who handles all the back-end coding and so there's really inequality in our time spent.<p>What should I do to keep up with stuffs? A lack of CS foundation really prevents me from doing all the back-end stuffs but after a while I'm now able to comprehend most of the code.<p>Should I spend more time on stuffs like SEO, analytics, design, or invest more in RoR and tougher things? I'm still pondering over this everyday and I really hope you guys can share your opinion about this. :-)

Just learn some markup and CSS stuff, there's always plenty of that to do and most programmers I know would rather be writing code. The nice part about this is that it's pretty easy to pick up, a month or so and you'll be able to at least look-up anything you need to do.

I strongly recommend you read 'Four steps to the Epiphany' by Steve Blank. As a business focused founder, you need to be handling customer development - really going out there, talking to customers, understanding who is your core market, getting paying customers, validating this into a proper scalable business, and developing your company positioning. That's a LOT of work - but it's ESSENTIAL for the success of any company. I'm on my 3rd business, and the 2nd one crashed because I didn't understand this. No business exists in a vacuum - what your product-focused founders are doing is important, but your role in developing the customer understanding and scalable business model is equally so.

Take responsibility for revenue &#38; profitability. This should be the #1 concern for at least one person in your team, sounds like you should take over this piece.<p>Quite simply assign a number you need to bring in for '09 -- that should keep you busy for 60+ hours a week.

I'd point you to two posts, the first is about a role I call "Everything But Code" <a href="http://jonsteinberg.com/post/67043520/everything-but-code" rel="nofollow">http://jonsteinberg.com/post/67043520/everything-but-code</a><p>The second is an extension of the idea, which I call Hackable Business Development. <a href="http://jonsteinberg.com/post/170568831/hackable-business-development" rel="nofollow">http://jonsteinberg.com/post/170568831/hackable-business-dev...</a><p>You can also handle a lot of the product management and the interfacing and deals that can be built upon your API and those of prospective partners

Nice idea firstly, there's no question of the growing importance of Chinese language and culture especially.<p>In regards to your intial question, like others have mentioned, a team requires a variety of skills. I am too an economics grad. and whilst I can write some code, I think we can excel in business related issues like marketing for example.<p>With my current startup, I am working on business development issues like partnerships as well as finance, marketing etc. )In addition to writing code and designing the user interface.)

If you're ever out of things on your to-do list, you have a big one still left: make your site #1 for the search query "learn chinese".

If I were you, I'd spend lots of time talking to users, including sitting alongside them (virtually if necessary) as they use the product.<p>This is a great thread, and I applaud your attitude in searching for ways to add value. Most people would simply try to defend their existing position. If you apply any of these suggestions, you should post a follow-up in a couple of months.

You appear to have deeper problems than just finding work for a single non-technical person. Your app seems to be an example of an unworkable product idea that was a ton of fun for someone to code.

Become a programmer.

I have been in a situation where this was the case: myself and another guy were the devs, and the non-programmer was the public face of the company: he did customer service, marketing, PR, specs, QA, research -- pretty much anything that we didn't have time to do. Once we got up to a significant amount of users he became overwhelmed so we hired more business people. OR you could use that time to learn how to program.

<a href="http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/cpg/1330457677.html" rel="nofollow">http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/nva/cpg/1330457677.html</a>