Here’s some advice to help non-technology founders maximise the value that they get out of the money they spend on their product.
You need to be able to show how every penny spent tracks through to increasing the value of the intellectual property in the business.
This is something that’s increasingly forgotten, and weirdly it’s of the things that we used to be better at “in the good old days”. The reality is that the way we build systems – cloud hosting, machine learning, etc – encourages a focus on monthly operational spend, and stops us thinking about how what we’re supposed to be doing is taking capital and investing it such that value within the business crystalises.
For technology businesses, the biggest part of that value is supposed to be the intellectual property in the software we build and the systems that we put into place in order to get that software into the hands of customers.
So when you’re busily writing cheques to people who are delivering your systems, make sure you can track all those little zeros on that cheque through to actual intellectual property.