What’s your traction so far?

I don’t think you’re wrong about the importance of QA. But not in early-stage startups when speed is the most important thing. We didn’t have ANY tests written before raising our (pre)seed round and expanding to another market.

Then, development slowed down, it took 30% more time to launch new features and test them (which is an eternity in startup world.)

I never had ANY investor ask me if we’re writing tests, what does our QA look like, how are we ensuring product quality. What ALL of them asked is - what’s your churn. If the churn is high, then there is something wrong with the product (wrong features, bad UX).

I don’t know what you do exactly, I just commented because of the round sentence, but I don’t think early-stage startups are your best target group. :) Except for maybe fintect, healtech, industries with big consequences if something goes wrong. I imagine QA is more important for them than for random SaaS tools.

I’ve seen rounds fail because of not reaching sales goals, not proving PMF, market being too small, not solving the right problem. You could say I’ve seen rounds fail because of bad/wrong product features. Never have I seen a round fail because of bad product quality.

Sure. I’ll take a look & anonymise the data :)

sure

yep, racquet sports, volleyball, etc

OK, let’s see what you got! :)

I am a non-technical co-founder CEO with a good understanding of technical lingo. I know a little bit of code (I could code super simple apps myself before GPT :)). I understand how stuff works. I can have a decent conversation with our developers, I can identify the flaws in the specifications and understand restrictions with certain ways of doing things.

As a co-founder of a tech startup, this was an extremely useful skill to have, because we never had a technical co-founder and did most of our development with an outsourced agency. (Yes, I’d change that, if I could find a good partner at the time.) This helped us move faster and give suggestions on what things to test, how to shorten dev time (making MVPs of features), which was crucial with an outsourced team.

But what helped the most were my sales and business development skills. You can always find a great developer (cofounder or an employee). It’s much harder to find a great sales person when you’re very early stage. You don’t know who your true customer is, you don’t know what your product is going to look like in couple of months, you’re sometimes not even sure if you’re solving the right problem.

You can always hire development. But nothing beats founder sales in the beginning.

So if you’re doing some preliminary research right now and trying to set yourself up with the best chances of success, I’d work on understanding the basics of product development and user experience design (even just learning the basics of what’s frontend, backend, how databases work, what languages can do what, can help you have a much better conversations with your potential partners).

But mostly I’d work on:

- learning how to test ideas quickly & iterate (read Lean Startup)
- learning how to talk to customers (read The Mom Test)- learning how to sell & negotiate (read Never split the difference)
- learning how to manage your time (just practice)
- learning how to manage people (Extreme ownership, radical candor)
- learning how to price products/bizdev (monetizing innovation is a good book for that)