If You Don’t Understand Your Tech, You Don’t Control Your Startup

Welcome back to NoteLoft Newsletter - the shortcut for founders who want to go from MVP to scale. Every week (ish - I’m working on it), my goal is to share what actually works when building software, so you can spend more time on deals, growth, and going to Pilates.

If you need help taking your product from MVP to scale, get in touch! We’ve grown our tech team, and we can’t wait to help you.

Let’s get into it!

Every now and then, I’ll hop on a call with a non-technical founder. They’ve validated their idea and hired a dev team to build it.

The problem is that they know nothing about their product from a technical standpoint. They don’t know what languages or frameworks their team used, what APIs their team used. They don’t know where the code lives, how the tech works, how often it’s deployed, or where it’s deployed.

This is a big problem for a bunch of reasons. Here’s a few:

You can’t tell the difference between progress and theater

And the team you hired knows that. I worked with a client who had this exact problem. The offshore team she hired to build her MVP wasn’t being honest about their progress. During meetings, they talked about all the work they did, but somehow they hadn’t delivered any new features or bug fixes in over a month. When she tried to ask questions about this, they’d drown her in “tech-speak”, or just talk over her, or dismiss her concerns all together.

So, that’s where I stepped in.

She hired me to do just one call with her team, and POOF! The day I showed up was the day they magically delivered every feature she’d been waiting on.

You don’t own the product - you’re just paying for it

When you don’t know where the code lives, how it’s deployed, or where it’s deployed, chances are that you don’t really own your code.

I’ve seen founders spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building a product, and have to shut their project down because they never have access to the code. Sure, they see demos, but they don’t know if their code is on GitHub, or GitLab, or somewhere else. They don’t know how to login to the demo they see week after week. They have no control over their project.

Then try to hire me to take it over. The problem is that in this situation I always have to step away, because I’ve never seen it resolved.

I’ve only seen founders shut down these projects and move on to something else.

Expensive technical decisions become irreversible

Frameworks, databases, hosting providers, and APIs aren’t easy to change later. They are foundational decisions that need to be made upfront but also need to be a bit flexible. Because once you start getting user feedback, you don’t know how your product will need to change.

The problem I see a lot of founders struggle with is that not only do they not know what technologies are being used, but when I step in to help them, we discover their dev teams chose the wrong technologies for the project.

Sometimes they’ve chosen some new, fancy technology that hasn’t been battle-tested. Not a great idea if you’re building in a sector that cares about compliance, or if you have a large waitlist.

Others it’s that they’ve built out an AI agent when vanilla JavaScript will do.

Whatever the reason, this is why founders need visibility around their tech early.
Not to micromanage — but to make sure the product can change when it needs to.

Being a non-technical founder is fine. Being disconnected from your product is not.

So if you’re a non-technical founder and you want to work with a team that will make sure you understand where your tech stands, get in touch: https://calendly.com/me--307/15min?back=1 

See you next week,

LaToya