There are definitely lots of difficult things other than technical challenges that come up in business. Like you said: making sales, deciding which features to build, etc. I'm not saying that they are "easy", however they pale in comparison to spending years building technical skillskets that allow you to build solutions to problems.
The main point I'm trying to make in the article is that "business guys", particularly the sort looking for technical co-founders, really need to teach themselves technical skills. In early stage companies (I probably should have made this more clean in my article), the business guys just aren't necessary. Any engineer can talk with his potential customers and get feedback. Any decent engineer can run A/B tests and improve their conversion rate. Any good engineer can make smart decisions based on their customer data and feedback, and become successful.
If you're a "business guy" and teach yourself technical skills, you're immediately more valuable. You can prototype basic features and get feedback. You have the technical understanding of your product to make informed customer decisions. You'll have the ability to spot problems early on, and make adjustments as needed to your product. Even if you're not necessarily a "good" programmer, you can still have much more of an impact with technical skills.
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There are definitely lots of difficult things other than technical challenges that come up in business. Like you said: making sales, deciding which features to build, etc. I'm not saying that they are "easy", however they pale in comparison to spending years building technical skillskets that allow you to build solutions to problems.
The main point I'm trying to make in the article is that "business guys", particularly the sort looking for technical co-founders, really need to teach themselves technical skills. In early stage companies (I probably should have made this more clean in my article), the business guys just aren't necessary. Any engineer can talk with his potential customers and get feedback. Any decent engineer can run A/B tests and improve their conversion rate. Any good engineer can make smart decisions based on their customer data and feedback, and become successful.
If you're a "business guy" and teach yourself technical skills, you're immediately more valuable. You can prototype basic features and get feedback. You have the technical understanding of your product to make informed customer decisions. You'll have the ability to spot problems early on, and make adjustments as needed to your product. Even if you're not necessarily a "good" programmer, you can still have much more of an impact with technical skills.