Sometimes people ask me: “As a CEO, don’t you have more important things to do than coding?”
And yes, there are a million things to do to get a tech startup like Waverly off the ground.
But if I’ve learned one thing from my previous experiences it’s that, until you reach product-market-fit, amongst the million things you need to do the most important one is…
…the product!
Our product is tech-centric. It lives and dies by its algorithm and by the experience we create for our users. What’s the best thing I can do in that context?
I could go to cocktails, talk about the product, do marketing, close partnerships. In fact, I’m doing it. It’s important, but it’s not as important as building a great product.
I could direct people, but our small team accomplishes wonder with little guidance. I correct course all the time, but it takes very little effort.
I could hire more people and run more experiments. However, our experimentation engine is bound by the speed at which our users can try new ideas. A bigger team would mean a higher burn with limited benefits — it may even distract us and slow us down.
I decided one of the best thing I could do was to code. Yes, I’ll revise this decision as we grow. I love all aspects of the CEO job. But for now I’m a coding CEO and I’m quite proud of my GitHub chart:
Phil Beaudoin 