So I was stalking myself online, as one is wont to do at 23:53 on a Friday night in the year of our what-in-the-world 2020…and I found my old Quora account from the early days of HeyTell. The comments from that era are really interesting reading after all this time; I was definitely wrong about a few things…Color and Path, for one—and there’s a real lesson in Twilio still going gangbusters: “In a gold rush, invest in picks and shovels.”

At some point, though, someone asked the question “How do I provide value to my startup as a non-technical co-founder?" and I launched into a pep talk that, while it’s aged a bit, may still retain a little value. Wanna hear it? Here it goes:

How do I provide value to my startup as a non-technical cofounder?

Nota bene: I’m actually a technical co-founder, but I didn’t start coding in Kindergarten, so I’m less technical than my partner by far!

There are so many things you can do; don’t think of it as “adding value”—you can be, in fact, pure, distilled value.

• User experience & product design: Use the product, play with the product, figure out what works and what doesn’t. Talk to users, get their feedback. Really think about who your users are and make sure that you and your partner are addressing them and their needs (accessibility? mobility? security? other stuff?) in the development of your technology.

• Roadmap/release planning: With your partner(s), sit down and hash out your general road map, release schedules, targeted features per release. As a startup, this is likely to be loose and you may find that you revisit it every few days—but generating and keeping a general schedule gives you all something to work from.

• User interaction: Man the tech support email account, accept and validate bug reports, prioritize feature requests, keep up with the Twitter feed, the Facebook fan page, banter a little—answer questions, be nice, make users feel good/smart, manage their expectations. It really only takes an hour a day to keep up with, but it’s a garden that needs tending and can really pay off in a very loyal user base. If your tech is good, but your users think your startup’s a jerk, they’ll bounce to the next sexy thing as soon as it arrives (many do that anyway, but if they remember how awesome you are, they’ll be back!).

• Test! Test everything you can. Use the heck out of your product. You can do a lot of useful manual testing, you also probably have the ability to learn a little bit of scripting to automate and/or bang on the product even harder. If you don’t already know how, ask your technical cofounder to give you a tutorial on your source control system and show you how to build the software and/or how to deploy a test environment. Report bugs, prioritize them together, track them, and verify that they’re fixed. Test on multiple environments that may consume too much Dev time. I.e., every platform possible. Long-running tests that just sit there for a few days, even. Do not tell me that catching a critical crash or memory leak before your product goes out the door does not add value! Do stuff he/she wouldn’t or doesn’t have time for (i.e., banging on stuff or using weird patterns a user is likely to). You will hear, “But a user would never do that!” But oh yes, they would…and they will…

• Beta programs: If you have these, run them. Solicit testers, write instructions and release notes, pull together mailing lists. Be sure to solicit feedback. Abuse Google forms.

• Localization: Localizing your product? Handle getting things translated. If you’ve got a good technical founder, they give you the string files for translation & can get you up & running with a test environment where you can run and test the your product with translated files when your translators return them.

• Stay abreast of the competition and news in your space. Know who’s doing what and when. Know which competitor’s slagging you when and where, even if you choose to ignore & high road. Don’t obsess over it, but be aware enough not to be taken unawares. Filter chaff & noise and share with your co-founder(s) as needed (this applies to all bullet-points here, actually).

• Track and manage financials: Handle accounting matters or deal with the person who does. Pay taxes, payroll, HR (if applicable), etc.

• Track and manage legal issues: Try to stay abreast of laws and regulation that effect your company. Handle meetings with lawyers, keeping the business in good standing, etc.

• Manage Biz Dev: Handle all incoming queries and meeting scheduling, from bigger fish companies sniffing you out to VC to sales calls to etc. Allow and encourage your partner to hand these off to you to manage/schedule if they get contacted directly and they believe the query’s worth pursuing. It’s likely that people will often attempt to go around you to your partner, but allow your partner to shunt initial queries to you if at all possible–be his/her umbrella all you can. If you’re in a place where you need to make rain, go make some rain.

• Manage Press Contacts: Arrange contacts with the media, help with initial drafts of messages that come from your tech team. Set up alerts and review news, gossip, and mentions related to your company on Twitter, Facebook (this is not the real point of youropenbook.org, but it’s really useful), Google News alerts, and so on. If your product’s ready for it, keep aware of the contests related to your industry and enter your product whenever and wherever possible.

• Manage Vendors: Pay them, negotiate fees down if you’re bringing in a lot of business, evaluate new ones for new services and redundant backups for existing services.

• Contribute to design & artwork: Any talent with graphics? Do what you can. I’m terrible with graphics, but the most iconic part of the HeyTell interface is mine. :D Any HTML background? Do the web site/marketing stuff! None of this background? Try picking it up or handle finding and working with someone cheap who can. :)

• Write Stuff: Technical documentation, blog posts, test plans, web site updates, internal how-tos & policy docs (for sharing, potential new partners, compliance, just so’s you don’t forget, etc.), press releases, customer support FAQs, drafts of any legal docs that you may need to work with lawyers for: patents, privacy policies, terms of service, etc., PowerPoint presentations (if you absolutely, positively cannot avoid them), pretty metrics graphs to show investors, etc.

• Talk to your co-founder(s): All the time, every day (oh, except when he/she is in the zone or fixing your bugs). Ask lots of questions, let them bounce ideas off you and you them. Argue, compromise, brainstorm together. Go get beers and brainstorm some more. Respect each other no matter what. It really is a marriage.

• Strategy: Managing all of the above gives you a pretty good instinct for how/where your startup should move and how quickly. You’re dealing with a lot of external and internal inputs that really help your gut guide you - you know where the market’s going, you know what your customers (say they) want, you know how your partner(s) are feeling and what he/she is capable of accomplishing in X amount of time. Filter and use all this data to help your team succeed—you are pure, distilled value!