Sales or programming?

[Alekqqqq]

Hello everyone! I am 23 years old guy. I will end my master's degree within a year in biotechnology. I am wondering about my career path. I know that I have to develop some skills to make a business in the future. For now, I feel that I need pure experience and take a job for a moment to learn something. What do you think is a better option - sales or programming and why? I know only the basics in programming as well as in sales. These skills seem to be very important nowadays, but I would like to concentrate on one. I am so confused because of the many possibilities. I am staying in one place and doing nothing except thinking about which pathway would be better. I would be glad if someone with experience could help me.

 

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[circleme]

Marketing & Sales! This comes from an “ex” software developer.

In most cases, developing the product is only a small part compared to the other tasks you have to do to create a successful business. No matter how good a developer you are, you can create the best product in the world that solves incredible problems. But if you can't sell it, it's of no use to you. I think it was Rob Walling who stated the following priority: Market FIRST, Marketing/Sales SECOND, UI/UX THIRD and Logic/Backend LAST.

Apart from that, I would less recommend the programmer route given your initial situation.

Main reason: time commitment.

There is such a horribly high learning curve between "I can program a bit" and "I develop functional, scalable business software with all the bells and whistles (Payment Service Integration, Licensing, Authentication, Security, Legal, ...)" that it probably not worth the effort. Because if you only put 10% of the time needed to learn these things into marketing & sales, I think you'll have a much better chance.

But the whole situation is incredibly subjective. I would have the money to temporarily hire developers (at least freelancers) for my products. But I am able to do 90% of it myself and can therefore put more money into marketing and sales. It's also much quicker to do it yourself. If I already had enough cash flow from my SaaS business, I would probably gradually outsource more and more coding and only do quality control. However, there are some SaaS founders/bootstrappers - including here in the forum (see eliquid) - who are very successful with it and code it themselves.

 

[Alekqqqq]

Thanks