What can you cut out?

“I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal

I was a mentor for Go Code Colorado over the weekend (mentioned previously). It was a good experience. About 10 teams, 30 mentors, and a couple of hours. I had a lot of fun chatting with the teams, which were all using open data provided on the Colorado Information Marketplace to build an app that will serve a need. They divided the mentors up into functional areas (data science, marketing, developer, startup vet, etc) and let us wander amongst the teams. Sometimes I felt a bit useless (one team was trying to debug a Meteor app that would run locally but failed when deployed to a web server) and other times I felt like I was a bit of a bother (since the teams were also trying to get stuff done while being “mentored”). But for the most part I had interesting conversations about what the teams were trying to accomplish and the best means of doing so from a technical perspective.

One thing that came up again and again was “what can you cut out”. The teams have a fixed timeline (they are only allowed to work until the final competition in early June) and some of the ideas were pretty big. My continuing refrain was:

• capture all the big ideas on a roadmap (you can always implement them later)
• cut what you can
• build a basic “something” and extend it as you have time
• choose boring technology

For example, one project was going to capture some data and use the blockchain for data storage. I totally get wanting to explore new technology but for their initial MVP they could just as easily use a plain old boring database. Or frankly a spreadsheet.

Lots of developers don’t want to hear it, but when you are in the early stages of a startup, technology, while an important enabler, can get in the way of what is really important: finding customers, talking to them, and giving them something to pay for.

PS This is a great read on all the hardships of building a startup and how it is so so so important to minimize any unnecessary difficulties.