Okay, it might be a bit of a stretch to say that building good software isn’t hard. It’s really hard.

But chances are, if you’re creating (or pondering creating) a software startup, it’s because you think you’re good at building software. Maybe you’re a great UI guy. Maybe you’re a killer coder. But either way, you’ve looked at what’s out there and you’ve said, “I can do better”… And you dive into the challenges of building a great piece of software.

The problem is that you will almost invariably focus on the problems and challenges that you are good at (especially if it’s your first business).

What prompted this post is a bit of blog surfing that led me to a post by Ryan Carson about DropSend. If you aren’t familiar with it, DropSend is a nice little app that allows you to email large files for a small fee. Ryan has been amazingly transparent about his business, so we know that DropSend has made about $100k in annual profit on $150k in revenue (though I’m assuming that doesn’t account for the time Ryan invests in it). Not a bad return on his initial investment of about $12k in development. Ryan has also been transparent about his desire to “flip” the app. He’s very publicly selling DropSend… until now, perhaps.

In the post, he recounts an email that he received encouraging him to invest a little time, effort, and money marketing DropSend. The email that Ryan received had lots of detailed advice, but the part the stuck out to me was:

I’m just going to be really honest with you. Simply because I don’t want to see someone purchase your site, run some basic marketing on it and make a killing off of it, whilst you did all the hard work.

After reading the email, Ryan says:

I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. How had I not seen this? Why have I been wasting DropSend’s capabilities to bring in valuable revenue for us?

The lesson here is that entrepreneurs are often very skilled, but not necessarily in the right areas. Web Geeks start consulting companies or product companies. A mechanic opens a garage. A fix-it guy opens a hardware store. The list goes on. The smart entrepreneur realizes that they just moved into an area where their core competency now no longer represents the majority of what they should be focusing on.

The guy who emailed Ryan was right on a lot of fronts. But I think he was dead wrong about Ryan having already done the “hard” work. Ryan’s clearly a seasoned developer and project manager. He’s sharp about finding cheap and effective resources (locally and now, apparantly, in Russia). Building high-quality web applications isn’t hard for him any more. The hard part is always the part that pushes outside of your core skillset into the unknown. As Ryan says, “I’m not sure my friend’s advice is 100% the way to go, but it’s a damn good start.”