To DIY or Not to DIY?

Every entrepreneur’s situation is unique because, well, everyone is unique.  As such, everyone has strengths and weaknesses, work they enjoy doing and work they can’t stand.  At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur or small business owner, you’ll have work you love to do – and work you can’t stand doing.  But it all needs to get done.  Now hopefully with your venture, most everything you do plays to your strengths and they align with work you enjoy doing.

However, we live in the real world and while “it takes a village to raise a child”, you as an entrepreneur or small business owner probably don’t have the luxury of said village for your “child”.  It’s probably mostly (only?) you pushing forward alone save some part-time assistance (but it still feels alone).

Now unless it’s a core offering to your business, you probably outsource some business functions by partnering with an accountant, tax-advisor, lawyer, etc.  Basically tasks that need your attention a few times a year (and hopefully not more!)  But what about Sales?  Marketing?  Product (App) Development?  Critical business processes which are 24×7 (aren’t these the things that keep you up at night?).

Assume your background is in Sales or Marketing and based on your conversations with many people you identify a pain-point or process inefficiency that an app could make better.  But you don’t know how to write code.  Or how to develop a product.  There are options available to you for learning how to develop and deliver an app, from EdX to Coursera or even codeless development such as bubble.is.  A bit of time, money and energy required (maybe a lot of time, sweat and tears if tech scares you).  You’ll need to decide if your time is better spent focused on Selling/Marketing and hire someone to at least validate your idea with an MVP.  Or do you carve out some time and learn how to create the app yourself.  This is partly a personal decision and partly a practical business decision with pros/cons.  If you’d like help in figuring it out, let’s talk.