Ask HN: Non technical HN users, what do you do for a living? |
Ask HN: Non technical HN users, what do you do for a living? |
I can hack together a website, have been teaching myself Ruby, RoR, some basic devops, etc. in addition to my knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. I know enough to have a somewhat technical conversation with engineers or PMs, and I know enough to setup my own conversion tracking most of the time. I'm also intimately familiar with many of the technical reasons tracking can be off or break since that is critical to understanding performance.
My core responsibility is to make my company lots of money by efficient and effective deployment of our marketing budget through various efforts. I spend a lot of time staring at spreadsheets and analytics dashboards "reading the runestones" in search of insights that will improve growth. I then take those insights and craft them into a strategy and business case to sell it in to key stakeholders so I can get the resources needed to execute on my strategy and make it a reality.
Marketing in general has actually gotten very technical over the last decade. My personal opinion is that one cannot be considered a "10x marketer" (if there is even such a thing) without having some understanding of the technical aspects that go into it. This means things like understanding data (how it flows, what it means, what it doesn't mean, where and why it breaks, etc.), how various channels play together, testing, automation, etc. At the very least you need to know enough here to hire the right people who are experts at those things since this industry is plagued by people claim to do more than they are really capable of.
On top of that there's the softer skills. Understanding messaging and positioning and the overall creative process. Marketing is just as much an art as it is a science. There's also a lot of people skills required for collaboration across teams of very different skill sets and personality types. You need to work with a team of creatives VERY differently than a team of engineers for example. Being able to effectively serve as the glue between various functional groups is a skill that has paid off in spades for me over my career.
There are dozens of us.
Over the next few months a great deal of my role will be in working with the technical team to implement the user friendly app and locking down our contractual agreements with the back end payment processors as well as locking down our hundreds of partner businesses. The majority of these have already committed it will just be a matter of getting the contracts together and inputting payment info for the back and forth payment streams.
Then it will be all about team growth and management and rapid user growth.
I also do the finance and marketing as a small startup. So far we have bootstrapped it all and we have talked about potentially applying to YC or looking at VC for funding to really bust it on growth, just uncertain if this is a viable path to growth given we are beyond the typical demographic (not in our 20s and low 30s). We do not want to put energies somewhere that would take away from the progress we have been making. Our founding team will make a decision on this in the next 30-45 days
Generally speaking - we use our (light) technical skills to analyze data and use it to help provide insight for strategy, both in the short term and long term. We are also the team that builds the longer range operational plans (working with PMs, Ops partners, other orgs etc-).
A large part of my work involves asking questions, interviewing, exploratory data analysis and developing business strategy.
In case anyone might be considering career options some semi-random background and bits of my thought process:
I haven't been getting any traction on the tech side locally as much as I enjoy the engineering and problem solving. So I started looking inside myself for assets/skills and limitations as well as around my community for where to find the opportunities.
My basic questions became: What can I do without being concerned about my age (in my 50s as of last year) and have high levels of autonomy regarding scheduling my time? Where is the money flowing locally? How do I put myself in the position of being a revenue center instead of a cost center?
What do I bring to the table? Computational thinking, problem solving, and picking up processes and systems fast. (Seems to help quite a bit with following the paper trail in a contract.) My demonstrated non-tech assets/skills (Argentine Tango instructor, math and software tutor, flight instructor) include connecting with people and being very calm in stressful situations.
As far as age goes, a number of people are real estate brokers well into old age. It's a great retirement career from what I am seeing.
Locally, real estate has been strong relatively speaking for a number of years. Seattle and Vancouver BC home prices are making my town very attractive as an alternative. Especially for those who can telecommute.
So I knew I could quickly learn the systems and processes of being a broker. I have the personal attributes/skills to connect and work with clients. As long as I am willing to learn from role models doing business successfully how I want to do business, in time I will be successful.
Plus, working under established brand/company has been very nice.
Considering all of the above learning how to be a successful real estate broker made sense for me. Now I can explore areas like infosec and cryptanalysis for fun. No pressure to monetize.