Twenty things a non-programmer should do in a startup; a list com­piled by Spencer Fry in response to a ques­tion asked on Hacker News:

  1. Writ­ing the copy for the web­site. Mainly keep­ing the sup­port doc­u­ments up-to-date.
  2. Doing all the busi­ness related tasks.
  3. Doing all the cus­tomer service.
  4. Han­dling all incom­ing e-mail.
  5. Doing all of the social net­work­ing stuff (face­book, twitter).
  6. Doing all of our mar­ket­ing. Han­dling Google AdWords, ban­ner adver­tis­ing, text adver­tis­ing, etc.
  7. Deal­ing exclu­sively with our accountant.
  8. Track­ing all of our expenses, etc., into Excel and get­ting every­thing ready for accoun­tant (see 7).
  9. Han­dling all legal work with our lawyer.
  10. Doing all of our net­work­ing. I’m the guy that goes to all of our rel­e­vant events.
  11. We all come up with ideas for prod­uct development.
  12. Blog­ging. I do all the blogging.
  13. Han­dling pay­roll. I do that.
  14. Deal­ing with the bank accounts. I deal directly with the small busi­ness rep at our bank.
  15. Mar­ket research. I find out as much as I can about our com­peti­tors, what they do, etc. I also learn about our mar­ket as a whole.
  16. Han­dling all incom­ing adver­tis­ing requests, set­ting up their cam­paigns, etc.
  17. Deal­ing directly with all our mer­chants (credit cards + Pay­Pal). Deal­ing with the very few charge­backs we receive.
  18. Pay­ing all of our bills (server expenses, soft­ware licenses, domains, adver­tis­ing, etc.) and mon­i­tor­ing our cash flow.
  19. Pitch­ing. I han­dle all of that.
  20. Any­thing that requires a phone call. Incom­ing or outgoing.

Fry has now writ­ten an arti­cle that pro­vides infor­ma­tion on what exactly these twenty tasks entail.

via @alexjmann