Happy New Years everybody! One of my favorite parts of 2011 was the amount of fun and interesting business ideas I have been able to work on. Many of these ideas were brought to me by poker players, and one overwhelming theme was “I have a great idea but no technical skills to implement it.”
JFDI
On a flight home from California a week or two ago, I was reading an Inc. magazine interview with several entrepreneurs, each of whom dished out one line of wisdom. Almost all of the advice was some version of JFDI: Just F***ing Do It. Unfortunately JFDIing is tough when you have no technical skills.
I love this quote from a Startups Open Sourced (an awesome collection of interviews that is definitely worth picking up) interview with Alexis Ohanian, one of reddit‘s two co-founders, on partnering with his technical co-founder Steve:
No matter how good your ideas are, you are at a massive disadvantage if you are technically clueless.
I’m not recommending going out an buying a bunch of programming textbooks and learning several languages from the ground up (although it’s certainly not a terrible idea), but learning the basics of a CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, whatever) or a language like PHP will at least allow you to hack together a “crappy version” prototype for most projects. The nice thing is, a “crappy version” goes a long way. It will help you:
- Determine if your idea is even feasible.
- Keep costs and time down when you have a professional polish (or re-do) your project.
- Learn what is easy/difficult/impossible for future projects.
- Become less dependent on others to get projects off the ground.
By NO means am I proficient in any technical aspect, from programming to graphic design. What I did pick up in 2011 was enough basic skills in WordPress/PHP/Photoshop to create crappy-but-passable prototypes of some reasonably advanced projects. This was incredibly helpful, and (maybe surprisingly?) a lot of fun too.
Getting Technical
If your technical skills are lacking, I’d highly recommend working on them in 2012. One cool initiative that’s worth checking out is Code Year from Codecademy:
It’s completely free, and I’ve completed the first couple of lessons. Their goal is to teach you to code over the course of a year by doing one interactive tutorial per week. The initial lessons focus on JavaScript, and they’ve got a Q&A forum if you get stumped. Some of the guys in 2+2′s BFI forum are going through the lessons in this thread. I tend to agree with Paul Graham (Y Combinator‘s founder) when he said,
If you want to invest two years in something that will help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
Most importantly, stop procrastinating and start tinkering around. JFDI! Good luck, and have a great 2012.
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