3 Geek Business Myths
I recently found a post by Ron Garret about Top 10 geek business myths that tells some common misunderstandings that geeks tend to suffer the first times they deal with entrepreneurship issues.
As a geek I have personally made some of those mistakes in the past, but being very far from the Valley my mistakes have been a little different than the ones listed by Ron (I never thought that $5M are necessary to start a business because there’s not $5M available to start a business here in Chile). So I present you with 3 additional geek business myths I have seen and committed on my way as an “internet entrepreneur” mostly on the web applications field:
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Code is the most valuable asset
Yes, code is a valuable asset, in fact if you are on an internet business chances are that without code there’s no business. But guess what? your most valuable assets are your users, the people that make your service noteworthy.
del.icio.us is a neat idea and i’m sure the code that runs it is good, but I can also do what they do in terms of code and so do you. What I don’t have is the same quantity of users del.icio.us has and that’s an advantage very hard to reach or surpass.
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Marketing is worthless (in fact every Business operation is worthless)
Chances are that as a geek you see business people as blood-thirsty vampires that only want to extract the last bit of life from humble and brilliant geeks like you. Well, that can be true some times hehehe ;), but most of the time it is not.
Business people are necessary to run the business, and running a business requires more than just understanding about pointers, classes or hardware. No, businesses need management that oversee and [hopefully] understand all the operations involved in running a business: promoting your service, selling, human resources, finances, strategy, etc. I agree with you that code matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters :).
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People appreciate technical advances
Guess what? People don’t like technical advances that much, in fact they just like them when they are old and well proved. Only early adopters like technical advances.
If you are a geek then you are an early adopter yourself, and surely your friends are also geeks so they also are early adopters, but the most part of the people are not that kind of people: they buy when everybody else bought so they believe they won’t waste their money on something that maybe won’t work.
Whether you like it or not, you will have to put aside your geek mindset when dealing with business issues. Most part of the time it will be more useful to use an entrepreneurial mindset: a way of seeing business as an integral organization devoted to create and sell products that give value for customers rather than being a way of showing technical wizardry. You can do it, it’s not that hard ;).
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May 14th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Geeks are very much like “my own people”, i.e. freelance translators. They hate to market themselves, they even seem to “despise” marketers and marketing. Maybe they are just too introverted, or too shy :-).
They seem to believe that since they are so good at what they do, the world should know it, without them having to “sell themselves”.
As a 30+ year veteran freelance translator, I was so shocked by this situation that I decided to start the “Translator Power” blog and its companion website - to advise freelance translators/interpreters on how to market their services and behave as full-blown entrepreneurs.
May 27th, 2007 at 2:51 am
I believe that geeks are just too introverted and too shy. That’s a consequence of the nature of our work: being seated in front of a computer for most of the time, doing things with other computers.
But ultimately this hate relation with marketing or management is up to every geek, and some of them not even don’t hate them but are tremendously able with “business tasks” (Bill Gates the best example?).