ESYB2 089 - Tips to Learn to Code on Your Own
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[00:00:00] Now let's begin talking about a situation that's really common. What if you have a technical idea, but you are a non technical founder or entrepreneur, what to do? You have a few options. All of them have their own pros and cons. The first impulse is to partner with some kind of an engineer to build your idea.

The challenge is that it's really hard to find great engineers to partner with. First of all, why would they build your idea for free? Probably they want to build their own ideas for free, or they can just have a job that's making six figures a year if they wanted to work for somebody else. So it's really hard to get them.

And also all engineers will tell you they're really good, but they might not be that good in the end. So you only learn that after you partner with them. So that's tricky. And you spend a lot of time going to different meetups, meeting them, inviting them over, getting rejected. Because obviously if you're starting out, you can't really pay.

So it's really hard to find engineers, first of all, but even if you find them. According to Paul Graham, who is the [00:01:00] founder of Y Combinator, which is the most successful startup incubator in the world. And I think that Paul Graham is one of the most respected, at least for me, business thinkers today. I listen to him and whatever he says, I'm like, wow, that's amazing.

I respect him the most. And he has experienced seeing hundreds and hundreds of startup teams come through his incubator. And he often says that most of the problems that happen is because the founding teams have never worked together before, and once they start working together, they find out all these bad things about each other, like one person is lazy, one person is not as good as they say they are, but they only learn that after they started.

So, usually he looks for teams that have worked together before, and if you've never worked together before, be careful, you want to start slow, don't jump into partnering. Test that person because you'll learn all sorts of things only after you've started working with them. Now the other option is of course hiring a freelancer or an agency.

[00:02:00] It's really expensive and often not that reliable. It's really risky and I don't often recommend it. I only recommend it in select cases. Most of the time people just end up losing money. Not little money, a lot of money. So my option that I suggest to people All the time. It's like, why don't you learn to code?

It's not easy. Learning to code can be extremely frustrating. You sometimes want to bang your head against the wall. And I know I'm a computer science major and I've done programming for companies. And I do programming for my own products. So I know it's frustrating at times. Believe me, I know. But at the same time, I also appreciate how much it empowers you to build anything you want long term.

It's a skill that's been really helpful to me. It's a double edged sword. It's really not easy. It's really frustrating, but it gives you so much extra potential and ability. And of course, it's very time consuming because if you're a single [00:03:00] entrepreneur, you want to focus on your marketing on your business, not your programming.

That's another challenge is that. Uh, programming is going to be a full time job almost. So it's very, very time consuming. So I a hundred percent understand there's a lot of challenges with learning how to code for non technical founders. But I do think learning to code and I would allocate like maybe one to three months for yourself to learn how to code the language in which your app or product will be.

In my opinion, it's better than risking five to 20, 000 by hiring a freelancer agency and just sitting on your hands and waiting for them and maybe they never even deliver, who knows. It's better to invest in yourself. Now, how do you learn? This is interesting. So you have a few options. When you get stuck, there is a website stackoverflow.

com helpful engineers will answer your questions and help you get unstuck. I use it all the time. When I'm stuck, you can take all kinds of courses. You can get coaching. From engineers that help you. And you can use this hybrid approach that I use. I [00:04:00] use an interesting approach. I hire engineers to program alongside of me.

They don't have to be in the same physical location. We can do it over Skype. But I use them to show me how to think, how to do things little by little. Because in my case, even though I'm a programmer, the most costly thing to me is sitting there being frustrated and stuck because it's extremely time consuming, figuring out new things.

So I just hire experts not to do things for me, but to show me how to get around those things where I'm stuck. A lot of times engineers I hire, they're engineers full time and I'm not. I'm like a online instructor. I'm an author. I'm a part time engineer. So obviously the engineers I'll hire are far better than I am.

Because they just do this all day, every day. And for them, where I'm stuck is really easy to show me how to get unstuck or how to get past those problem points. And then I just keep going. So we get on Skype and we work on a small technical piece. They explain to me how to do it. And then I go and do it by myself [00:05:00] because a lot of programming, it's repetitive.

So when I learn a skill, probably I'm going to be using that skill. Over and over and over and over and over because there's a lot of little techniques that you just learn and then once you figure them out, you just keep doing them and doing them. So it's actually. A very effective way, for me, I spend about 10 times less than if I had to hire the people and I'm aware of everything that's going on in the code, so in case something happens and my developers or my agency quits on me, I'm not totally lost, I'm able to navigate it, I know what's going on.

Also, I know if some freelancer or agency would be not telling me the truth, I'd be more likely to tell if they're overbilling me or something like that. And also I have more control and I can make decisions better. And most importantly, I spend very little time. On this, because I'm spending zero time being stuck.

So it's very productive while at the same time, [00:06:00] the project is moving forward at a very tiny cost. And so this is a hybrid approach of having engineers teach you. And then you just go and write the code in a way that's much more smooth sailing. That's a style that I love. It's actually really fun because it takes out all the frustration out of coding.

And then you just get to try things and play around with your ideas and see them come alive. So if you're timid about programming, at least I would try to do that because maybe getting support on a regular basis from an, from another engineer can help you get over the hump and help you build momentum and learn to code.

But anyway, those are the few options you have ranging from partnering to outsourcing to learning to code on your own by taking courses to this unique hybrid approach that I use.

