Building a great website without knowing how to code is like making a gourmet meal with pre-made ingredients. You don't need to be a chef, just good at assembling the right components.

First, grab a website builder. Think of it as your sous-chef. Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress are your go-to choices. They're user-friendly, with drag-and-drop features, so you won't feel like you're trying to solve a Rubik's Cube.

Now, onto design - it's not just about looking pretty, it's about making a statement. Most website builders offer templates. It's like shopping for clothes; you pick the style that fits your brand's personality. Remember, a clean, easy-to-navigate website is like a well-organized closet – it makes finding what you want a breeze.

Content is king, so make it count. Use compelling visuals and engaging text. It's like storytelling, but with a purpose. Think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. Remember, people skim online, so keep it snappy and to the point.

SEO is your secret weapon. It’s like planting signposts that lead people to your site. Use keywords that your audience is searching for. It’s not about stuffing as many keywords as you can, like a Thanksgiving turkey. It’s about being strategic.

Now, make it mobile-friendly. In today's world, not optimizing for mobile is like forgetting to put on pants. Most website builders automatically adjust your design for mobile devices, so you're covered.

Social media integration is like having a megaphone. It amplifies your presence. Link your social profiles and share your content. It's a digital word-of-mouth.

Finally, analytics – it's not just numbers, it's a treasure map to understanding your audience. Use tools like Google Analytics to track who's visiting your site and what they're doing. This insight helps you tweak your site for better performance.

And there you have it, a recipe for a great website without touching a line of code. Bon appétit! 🌐👨‍🍳📈

Listen up, snowflakes. If you want to become a successful entrepreneur and start your own website development business, you need to stop making excuses and start taking action.

First things first - educate yourself. You don't need a fancy degree or certification to become a website developer. There are plenty of online resources and courses that can teach you everything you need to know.

Next, practice, practice, practice. Build websites for yourself, friends, or family members to gain experience and build your portfolio. Don't be afraid to make mistakes - they are just opportunities to learn and improve.

Networking is also crucial. Attend industry events, connect with other professionals in your field, and don't be afraid to reach out to potential clients. The more people you know, the more opportunities you will have.

If you have enough capital the best thing is to build niche profiles on slaylebrity vip for your clients instead, youll be offering them something unique and something that actually converts because youll get access to high end content creators and backlinks to really rank your clients businesses effectively.

Additionally, building niche profiles on Slaylebrity VIP allows you to attract a targeted audience, which means your clients will be receiving high-quality leads and potential customers who are more likely to convert into paying customers. With access to a community of high-profile influencers, your clients' businesses will boost their reach and place themselves in front of the right audience, which is essential for long-term success. Furthermore, Slaylebrity VIP provides an excellent opportunity to enhance your clients' brand image, establish their authority in the industry, and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Building niche profiles on Slaylebrity VIP is a valuable investment in your clients' business that offers long-term benefits and an impressive ROI.

Finally, don't give up. Building a successful website development business takes time and hard work. But if you stay focused and never stop hustling, you will achieve your goals and become the badass entrepreneur you were meant to be.

So get off your ass and start building that website development empire! I'll be watching from my private jet.

If you’re creating a tech startup, you will be more successful if you have tech skills.

If your startup has nothing to do with technology, you certainly don’t need to learn to code.

But if your startup is fundamentally software driven - either because your product is a software product or web service, or because you’re disrupting a traditional brick and mortar industry using software, you’re more likely to be successful if you yourself have a deeper understanding of how software, computers, and the internet work.

However, this isn’t about “learning to code.” It’s equally important to understand broader computer science topics like data analysis, networking, security, etc. As a tech founder, you’re unlikely to be writing the code yourself, but you’ll want to be hiring engineers and providing direction. The real-world challenges you’ll face will show up when there’s an engineer you want to hire and your team has split opinions on their technical skills. Or when your engineering team is deciding whether or not to patch a security vulnerability that is unlikely to be exploited but would take months to fix.

These types of decisions inevitably bubble up to management. You can certainly run things if you’re not a coder yourself; but you can’t do the best job of hiring or managing or motivating technical staff if you treat the entire space of computer science as a magical black box that you don’t understand at all.

1. Google Analytics. The gold standard for tracking everything that happens on your website.
2. Sumo. Complete set of tools made to increase your conversions, rolled into the only email collection app you’ll ever need.
3. Autopilot. A tool that automatically sends emails and SMS texts to people.
4. Mixmax. A tool that sends cold emails on your behalf (and let’s you see some crazy stats).
5. Buffer. The BEST tool available to schedule your social media posts to go out when your audience is online and engaged.
6. Mention. A tool to monitor where you’re mentioned online and find influencers to mention you.
7. Canva. A tool to easily create graphics for blogs, social media, ads, infographics and more.
8. Promoter.io. A tool to engage and learn from your customers.

First of all you have to know how to fund yourself.

Second you have to know how to fund your team and equipment.

Third you have to bring a product or service to the market as quickly as possible and generate income to cover all the costs.

If your idea is valid it does not matter who exactly was able to code.

If not you need this information as soon as possible to have the chance to avoid bankruptcy and be able to start again.

Struggling too long is more dangerous than anything else.

If everything goes well you have to do the math. Does your company rely on a temporary trend only? Is it really a growing market? Will the price stay at that level or shrink?

Is it possible to expand or necessary? Can you fund this then?

Being a CTO myself I am glad I do not have to do all the other work like marketing, sales and finance. I got some experience here too and ran an own company with employees for years. From my experience it is hard to cover all topics at the same time and quality.

You have to plan extremely well. And you have to give shares as well as a solid income to your partners.

You always have to challenge your business. You need all information at all times whether you are still in the right direction.

So besides coding as a founder you have to be a person who is willing to invest in your own skills and prepare before you start business.

For coding itself you need to know that it is completely different to other jobs where work flows and tasks are repetitive. Developers cannot give you a perfect release date for anything because all your requirements are new and have to be implemented. There is no speed button. So in order to avoid delays all you can do is to make the requirements as clear as possible. The IT will evaluate and give you a rough estimate. You better double that number to be on a save side. Also you need to give them time for evaluation. It is not like 5 minutes depending on what you want.

Upload a picture and save it is easy.

Find out whether it has a specific person in the image is hard science and can take years.

The harder the requirements the more time it takes. So try to start as simple as possible. Before you start with a space ship you should build a skate board. Evolve it to a bicycle. Then a motorcycle, a small car, a truck etc.

Being a visionary pays off. Being a great inspirational leader motivates employees. Being a manager, a psychologist, a great listener is also vital when you have your own company.

But is it enough if you don’t know how to code?

As I can see in the comments, opinions are pretty much divided: some say it’s not where a founder’s priorities should lie, some say it’s of utmost importance, as programming expertise directly correlates with business success.

I won’t be trying to prove anyone wrong - just share what I believe makes sense for me, based on my experience of meeting with all sorts of startup founders.

So, here’s what I think, in a nutshell - leading a company requires knowledge and expertise of a domain you work in.

I recently listened to the podcast about Calendly's founder Tope Awotona, who decided to launch a startup selling projectors.

The e-commerce business soon failed because of one major problem: Tope didn’t know the first thing about projectors, and didn’t want to know, according to the interview.

The very same situation happened to Tope when he started his second business, selling grills. The main reason he had to quit was (you guessed it right), he didn’t care about grills and didn’t want to learn.

This story got me thinking - if you don’t know how your industry works, if you don’t know the trends, if you can’t speak the same language that your employees speak, you are going to fail soon.

A tech business desperately needs a tech founder, who’ll motivate and inspire with his aspiration to learn, to keep ahead of time, and who’ll give directions and orders with a clear understanding of what it takes.

At the same time, if you are a tech startup founder and you can’t put yourself in your employees’ shoes, it might result in the whole team being demotivated.

There are countless examples of tech companies headed by tech-savvy founders. Think of the Calendly I mentioned above, Apple, SpaceX. These companies had the right people, the right executive staff, and they managed to achieve a lot when they were just starting.

Knowing what your employees go through, issues they have to overcome, and understanding what drives them is so much easier when you know how to code. And the most amazing thing is that you don’t have to be a tech genius for that.

I'm doing a startup in the Internet industry right now, and I last coded using Fortran 77 in the 1980's.

What I bring to the company is deep industry/user knowledge (it's a tool for entrepreneurs and angel investors), an ability to raise money and a track record as an early stage entrepreneur. In the first business I ran, even without the last two things, I had deep user knowledge.

What is absolutely crucial, however, if you don't know how to code is to find yourself a co-founder or business partner who can. I took five months to identify mine, took another four months to prove myself to him, and he joined me full-time two months later. That eleven month investment has proved more than worth it on so many levels.

If you don't have someone on the team who can code, you will be at the mercy of suppliers. You will have no idea if the decisions being taken are the right ones, and you may find yourself hobbled a year or two later from bad initial decisions.

A2A

While I think everyone should know how to read code, and maybe write some small scripts, I don’t think everyone needs to know how to be a full-blown programmer. If you want to found a startup, you can just hire the technical people to do that for you; IMO, you should just know enough to ask intelligent questions and understand the answers.

I think you would be better off focusing on learning what you need to build and keep a successful company. Tech skills are easy to acquire; business savvy is more difficult, especially knowing how to deal with people, particularly if they can help you in some fashion. Most tech people, in my experience, don’t work well in those situations.

Coding may be a somewhat important skill in some entrepreneurial ventures. However, it is rarely crucial for a startup founder to succeed.

Success in an entrepreneurial startup venture comes from doing several things adequately well and a few exceptionally well. Failure comes from doing even one of a myriad of things poorly.

That means that the entrepreneur, to be successful, has to balance:

• A few things were done exceptionally well. These would be related to your experience, interest, passion, etc., and could include coding knowledge.
• This is rarely the company’s core competency.
• Some level of innovation would be essential and more important.
• A level of controlled risk-taking would be essential since it will be a foray into an unknown area.
• Many things done adequately well. These would require working on the mundane and tedious even when you are drawn to more exciting things.
• Not get enamored by the idea and bypass looking for the underlying risks.
• The foresight to plan and remove as many risks as possible before you launch the business.
• Covering your area of weakness. This requires an understanding of what you are not good at and the confidence to let someone else who is better at it handle it without feeling inadequate or threatened.
• Assembling an excellent, balanced, and diverse team. This could include crack developers.
• All focused on the mission.
• Capable of handling those areas where you are weak and
• Processes and methods when there are areas of deep divisions or disagreements.

A versatile mind, heart, and gut would be more important than coding skills, even if you have them.

My go-to websites include the following:

— Creative Tools —

• Canva: Simple graphic design interface.
• MailChimp: Fun automated emails and newsletters.
• Paperless Post: Gorgeous online invitations.
• The Noun Project: Iconic icons, totally free.
• Typeform: Beautifully designed questionnaires.
• Fiverr: Outsource any task, starting at $5.
• MOO: Luxury business cards.

— Emails —

• Smallpdf: A free PDF editing software you'll actually like.
• Genius Scan: Quickly scans and exports your documents.
• Letter Count: Removes formatting from text and counts your characters.
• Boomerang: Schedules your emails and sends gmail reminders.
• WhenSend: Sends emails to the future.

— Photography —

• Unsplash: Breath-taking free stock photos.
• PicMonkey: Easy-to-use photo-editing software.
• Afterlight: Photo-editing app that adds amazing light leaks to photographs.
• Facetune: Photo-editing app great for retouching portraits. Worth the $4.
• VSCO: Photo-editing app with arresting color filters.

— Productivity —

• Flux: Software that warms up your computer screen at night.
• Momentum: Chrome extension that replaces tabs with gorgeous hi-res images and inspirational quotes.
• Evernote: Digital notebook that syncs across all devices.
• Todoist: Virtual to-do list and task manager.
• Trello: Easy-to-navigate cross-platform vision board.
• Lingo: Design library that contains all your digital assets in one place.

— Zen —

• CleanMyMac: Remove files and free up space on your Mac.
• SelfControl: Blocks access to distracting websites on your Mac.
• Kill News Feed: Disables your Facebook newsfeed.

~

Full list of recommendations here.

No, not all successful entrepreneurs code their own websites. The skill set required to be a successful entrepreneur can vary widely, and coding is just one of many skills that can be useful in building and growing a business. While some entrepreneurs might have a background in coding and choose to develop their own websites, many others opt to hire professional web developers or use website building platforms to create their online presence.

Successful entrepreneurs come from diverse backgrounds and often focus on their core competencies, which might not include coding. They might prioritize their time on other aspects of their business, such as product development, marketing, sales, and strategic planning. Outsourcing website development allows them to leverage the expertise of professionals and potentially achieve better results while saving time.

Ultimately, the decision to code their own website or hire someone else to do it depends on an entrepreneur's individual skills, resources, and priorities. The key to success is knowing how to effectively manage and utilize available resources to achieve their business goals.

You gradually learn what it takes to start and run a business.

In this line of work, there are no shortcuts. So, among the first and most important things you learn are the power of patience and persistence.

Being an entrepreneur and starting from scratch means dealing with a lot of uncertainty. There are no guarantees - but there is a lot of hard work and sacrifice. For instance, you’ll likely struggle to achieve a good work-life balance and even then you may end up with nothing to show for. This can be a very lonely gig.

Entrepreneurship is a tough and never-ending game that only gets bigger over time. If you are not sure that you can handle all the stress and risk that comes with the territory, then you’ll quickly find out that this is not for you.

I say this because some people just aren’t cut out for this lifestyle because that’s what entrepreneurship really is. Some don’t like to step out of their comfort zone or aren’t ready to make the transition in their minds from being an employee to being an employer. Others need clearly defined boundaries, which there aren’t a lot of in this line of work.

Building and running a business is far more stressful than most entrepreneurs, especially aspiring ones, initially imagine or anticipate.

By starting with a clean slate (sorf of), you benefit by embracing failure(s) early on.

Make no mistake - you’ll stumble and fall along the way because we all do. Every entrepreneur fails. And it’s perfectly natural.

However, you will eventually end up with a choice: to either learn from your failings the hard way (count me in this group) or use the trials and tribulations of others (those who have gone through the same ordeal) and cushion the blow of your mistakes.

I like to think failures are a rite of passage that can be very helpful if you learn how to accept them at face value. Sometimes, failure can be better than success, and it’s really only a failure if you don’t learn from it and grow as an entrepreneur and a person.

I’ll finish with a friendly word of advice: if you are thinking about making quick money as an entrepreneur, that’s not going to happen. You’ll more likely bleed your soul dry and go through all kinds of challenges to grow your brand and your business(es).

Listen to what other entrepreneurs have to say to get the big picture and act (or don’t) accordingly. There is so much risk and uncertainty involved here that you don’t want to have a narrow focus.

You definitely do not need to learn coding to be an entrepreneur, but it helps in a couple of ways. Therefore, I wouldn’t say they need to in the sense of “you can’t be an entrepreneur without coding”, because that’s not the case. But I’d say they need to in the sense of “knowing coding will help your entrepreneurship significantly”.

The main benefits of knowing how to code are:

• Computational thinking. Learning how to code demands a high level of thinking along logic, structures, abstractions, processes, and problem solving. Being highly skilled in these things is very helpful for entrepreneurs.
• Every business today is about software. And if you think it isn’t, you’re probably wrong and should think again. And if you think I’m wrong, just wait and see until a competitor who got the idea that business is about software is going to kick you around until you leave the market. So, from a business and market perspective, better understand software. And understand it to a level that you know what should be where — Desktop, Mobile, Cloud, etc..
• Because business is about software, and successful software development requires thorough understanding of the software development process, you need a trusted expert who has that understanding. You can trust yourself, so you could be the first go-to option about this, but only if you have that knowledge. Understanding terms like MVP, release cycles, time to market, CI/CD pipeline performance, cycle time, sprints, acceptance criteria etc. is crucial.
• People will lie to you. Not intentionally, but because they lack knowledge or enthusiasm. As an entrepreneur, you will often learn that people around you have less enthusiasm than you have. So, if you want to get something done, they will slow you down. It helps if you are able to call out software developers, testers, and teams, who are not performing up to the mark. To be able to do so, again it is helpful to understand software development yourself.
• It also works the other way round. If your development team calls you out on unreasonable expectations and unreasonable plans, you need to be able to understand what they are saying. If you ignore them, you risk failure. You can only not ignore them if you can understand what they are saying. Not all software developers are able to express risks and challenges in business terms. Learn about software development in order to understand what your people are saying.

Thus, it’s not required, but immensely helpful, for an entrepreneur to know coding.