Your value isn't in your app (it's in these two places instead)

Thanks for your amazing response on last week’s edition! I’m thrilled you enjoy it. Much more to come and I’m working on something special for ‘founder members’, which you now officially are 😉 x Maxim

The healthcare founder I spoke with last week had already won half the battle.

Academic institutions wanted to work with her. Healthcare workers were interested.

Her biggest problem?

She didn't realise she'd already won.

She was fretting about her tech team, wondering if they were good enough, staring at an overwhelming list of features to build, and worrying about whether her app would be "perfect" enough for her pilot.

Sound familiar?

Here's what I told her (and what I'm telling you): Your technology is not your primary value.

Yes, I know that sounds mad coming from someone who's spent her career building tech products. But after helping hundreds of founders launch their products, I've seen this too often.

Most founders obsess over their tech when they should be obsessing over something else entirely.

This happens because technology feels like the biggest black hole for non-technical founders.

You know your industry inside and out. You can spot opportunities and solve problems that technical founders would never even notice. But put you in front of a development timeline or feature list? Suddenly you're second-guessing everything.

It's completely understandable. Tech is the one area where you genuinely don't know what you don't know. So it consumes a disproportionate amount of your mental energy and worry time.

The cruel irony? While you're agonising over whether your login flow is intuitive enough, you’re not spending time out there building the relationships and securing the partnerships that actually matter.

Think of it this way: You're polishing the display case while the real diamonds are sitting in a drawer.

For this healthcare founder, her real value wasn't in her app's features or slick UX. It was in:

That's her moat. That's her gold mine.

The app? It just needs to work well enough to facilitate the core connections. It doesn't need to be perfect.

(If there’s anything worth perfecting, it’s the experience… but that’s a story for a different day!)

I see this same pattern across industries. Your real value likely lives in:

There’s a difference between building a tech startup and building a startup that is tech-enabled.

Founders consistently put 80% of their energy into the tech, which often represents only 20% of their actual value proposition (i.e. delivery).

This insight played out in real time when we discussed her landing page strategy for recruiting healthcare workers. We were working with a massive form asking for every possible detail upfront.

I suggested a completely different approach – a three-part landing page structure:

Why? Your landing page isn't just a data collection tool. It's the beginning of your relationship with users.

Each step should provide clear value: "If you give us this information, we can do amazing stuff for you."

Not only that, you own your future users in a database that's easily accessible, you can reach out to them directly, and you're not held hostage by your development team.

No begging developers for user data, no waiting for them to build you a way to contact YOUR people, no dependency on custom systems that might break.

For early-stage founders, I'm constantly reminding them that brand matters more than perfect technology.

And brand doesn’t have to be Coca Cola levels “huge”. It’s how you make your people feel. And if you are offering them something that is a win-win, they will want to work with you.

My healthcare founder needed to convey her offer in a way that made them “get it”. She didn't need the world's best matching algorithm (yet).

Instead, we looked at:

And most importantly, she needed to start building that database of interested folks immediately, even before her app was fully built.

If you're a non-technical founder, here's my advice:

Remember, McDonald's spends billions on advertising — i.e. telling people they exist (!!) — despite everyone knowing what they sell. Why? Because when people see those glossy golden arches, they think, "Actually, maybe I am in the mood for a Big Mac today."

Your job isn't just building tech – it's making sure people know what you offer and can't resist saying yes.

(And tell them again. And again. And again…)

The tech can get better over time. The relationships and network you build now? That's your real gold mine.

PS — If you know a founder who's obsessing over their app instead of their real value, forward this email to them. They might just thank you for saving them months of misplaced effort (and a small fortune in development costs).

Code explained in plain English for founders who need to work with developers