Coding Your Dreams Into Reality: Lessons From an Engineer Turned Entrepreneur

Engineers make great entrepreneurs. So a startup that has two engineers as its founders must be twice as good, right? Not exactly.

On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we talk to Jake Lumetta, founder and CEO of ButterCMS. A serial entrepreneur, Jake found success (and failure) with numerous startups before striking it big with ButterCMS.

He joins us today to discuss practical advice for engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, like knowing when to step away from the keyboard and handover the codebase, why building a B2B startup is so much easier than building a B2C, and why two engineers founding a company together isn't always a good idea.

Episode Highlights

• (2:41) Introduction
• (3:58) Lessons in entrepreneurship
• (17:15) Talking to customers
• (18:52) Transition from engineer to CEO
• (24:00) Stepping away from coding
• (25:14) Building B2B vs. B2C
• (30:05) Worst mistakes you can make as a founder

Episode Excerpt

Dan: How did you get your first customer?

Jake: Scrapping and clawing, just scrapping and climbing through my personal network, talking to as many people as I could. And it just got lucky, you know, I knew someone who knew someone who maybe knew someone who, you know, had a pretty kind of simple side. They weren't like large enterprise that was a small startup. And they needed to add a blog to like a Rails site. And they, this sounded perfect for them. And that's what I was marketing Butter as at that time. So, I engage with them. And there were all sorts of bugs. They were like trying to get it to work. And then there were all sorts of bugs, and I remember hopping on the call and, like, just doing anything and everything I could to, like, get this guy to be happy. And then then I was like, you know, would you be okay, paying like 19 bucks a month for this, you know? And they're like, yeah, you know, of course. But for me, I was, like, super nervous to ask that. It was, I didn't know if it was, like, maybe 90s to me, should be like nine a month or something like, I don't know, like, what's the right number here? And so yeah, so anyway, that got them to sign up for 19 bucks a month. And it was huge.

Dan: Kind of what I learned is, really, the price doesn't matter, you know, or even the first 10 or whatever. It's more like going from free mode. I'm getting something that's free to I'll pay for almost anything. Yeah, you probably want to do it like over $1 or whatever. But, like, you know, it doesn't really matter if it's like 19 or 24. Yeah, you know, yeah, figure all of that out later. But the huge thing is, like someone said, yeah, like, I'll put up some money for it. Right? Put in my credit card or send me an invoice or whatever that is. I remember when that happened. At LinearB, it's like a moment that you say, okay, we're starting to see a little bit here.