I watched a video called “Learning to Code Made Me a Worse Entrepreneur” and honestly, it felt like someone was reading my own story back to me.
It’s by Justin Ferrari. He says he has spent almost 10 years trying to build businesses, and one of his biggest mistakes was learning to code.
Sounds ridiculous, right? It isn’t.
Because when you can code, building is easy. And it becomes very easy to spend months building something nobody actually asked for.
His 4 Mistakes
- Building before checking demand. He and his co-founder built Top Scholar, a full platform for English tutors in Europe, in under a year. Nobody had checked if tutors wanted it. It failed soon after launch. Then he did the same thing again with a project management app for web agencies, and only after building it found out none of them cared.
- Underestimating marketing and distribution. He used to think marketing was something you do after you build. Now he thinks about distribution before building anything.
- Confusing activity with progress. Eight hours in VS Code feels productive. But are people signing up? Are they paying?
- Not knowing when to move on. He spent about four years on one project, and the more time he had put in, the harder it was to stop. Sunk cost.
I have made all four. Let me show you.
Mistake 1: I Built Before I Checked
My first SaaS product was UptechLMS.
The idea: rephrased content from The Economist, Dawn and The New York Times, to help CSS exam takers, because the exam often tests English more than knowledge.
We started coding without proper market research.
Later we realised simplifying English content might not even have been necessary. And our market, Pakistan, does not really have a culture of paying for SaaS. People look for free alternatives or cracked versions.
We found that out after building. Not before.
It took us 6 to 8 months to build. There was no AI back then. It was actually Stack Overflow time.
And after all that, it had 1 user. My friend.
Mistake 2: I Thought The Product Would Sell Itself
Developers love this lie.
With UptechLMS, the plan was that I put in the time and development, and the investor covers marketing and operations. He wanted to fund only half. The agreement was never clear, and because he was a close friend of my father, I kept agreeing to terms that weren’t good for the business.
And honestly, no one did any marketing. My investor thought people would just come. It solved a serious problem in the market, so why would we need marketing?
Then there was Signly, my DocuSign alternative. I built the first version in 17 hours with a lot of help from AI. Building was the fast part.
The only person who used it was me.
Again, because I’m not good at marketing. And I did try this time.
Mistake 3: Busy Is Not Progress
We decided not to rely on AI back then, because tools like ChatGPT weren’t common yet. So we hired full-time content writers.
Lots of work. Lots of content.
But monthly revenue stayed modest, and breakeven became a long-term challenge.
Busy? Very. Progress? Not really.
Mistake 4: Knowing When To Stop
I shut UptechLMS down after paying its expenses out of my own pocket for a couple of months.
By then I had already spent more than Rs 1 million on it.
I have the same problem with people. I wrote before about keeping team members on payroll when there wasn’t enough work, and hesitating too long before making necessary but difficult decisions. It’s the same mistake. Just with a product instead of a person.
What I Would Tell Every Developer-Founder Now
Building is not the hard part anymore. AI made sure of that.
Marketing is the biggest skill everyone should have today.
Products used to take long to build. Funding rounds. A separately hired marketing team. Now one person can build 4 to 5 products in a month and launch one in days. If you know marketing, you can earn more than companies that have been in the market for one or two decades.
So before you write the first line of code:
- Talk to the people you think will pay. Ask if they actually will.
- Decide how you will sell it, and who will do the selling.
- Measure progress by users and revenue, not by features shipped.
- Decide in advance what result means it’s time to stop.
I learned all of this the expensive way, at Uptech Sol and with UptechLMS.
You don’t have to.
– Umar H.
Video: Learning to Code Made Me a Worse Entrepreneur (4 Mistakes I Made) by Justin Ferrari.
