Many (not all) very successful startups have been founded by a hacker and hustler, and there is an ongoing debate on the definition of their roles and weight of their responsibilities. Needless to say, how a hustler spends his or her time is less obvious than a hacker.  If you are the “idea person”, what do you do when it’s time to execute? Here are 10 things that make up a non-technical founder’s (NTFs) hustle:
 
1. Product Development: You may not be able to code, but you should still be able to speak the language. Even a small amount of technical wherewithal will come in handy in a lot of ways. A NTF should be able to describe (understand) the stack, manage requirements, test the application, etc.  It is a tech company, after all.
 

What’s the difference between a hacker, magician and hustler? (via Quora)
- The hacker does it and tells you how he did it.
- The magician does it but doesn’t tell you how he did it.
- The hustler doesn’t do it, but will tell you all about how he did it.

2. Design: If you can’t build it, at least draw it. Leave the customer facing design stuff to the professionals, but learn how to wireframe and draw detailed work-flows. In addition to typical desktop applications (Fireworks, Photoshop, etc) there are plenty of other less expensive options you can use for this.

 3. Customer (User) Acquisition: No startup’s idea is unique. There are 100 other entrepreneurs developing the exact same thing somewhere in the world. So while technical differentiation is important, figuring out how to acquire more customers than the other 99 entrepreneurs is a huge challenge. Coming up with that strategy is arguably more valuable than anything else in a company’s early stages.
 

 To be an entrepreneur requires great optimism, and a very strong belief in how much customers will love your product. Unfortunately this same attribute can also lead entrepreneurs to believe that customers will beat a path to their door to purchase the product. This frequently causes them to grossly underestimate the cost it will take to acquire customers.  - David Skok

 
4. Selling: A startup’s first few customers are the hardest to get, and the most important. They’ll have a huge something to do with everything.  So not only do you have to sell well, but also sell strategically. Since you probably won’t have much of a budget for a dedicated sales team, chalk that up as another thing the NTF has to do.
 

One of the hardest things for me to get used to, as a geek/artist/writer in business, is the constant disappointment of sales. The harsh reality, however, is that many leads will not turn into clients, no matter how exciting they might seem at first. And yet each lead must be given attention, enthusiasm, dedication, and so on, if it is to have any chance at all of turning into a sale. - Dharmesh Shah

5. Customer (User) Relationships: Unless you have an enormously sticky application with subscription revenue and an irreplaceable value proposition, you should constantly stay in front of customers. That may be via email, phone or meetings or even less binary ways like blogs, tweets and white papers. You should keep demonstrating competence to the people paying for, downloading, or clicking your product.

72% of founders find out that their initial intellectual property is not a competitive advantage. - Startup Genome Project

6. Customer (User) Feedback: A product of your relationship with the customer is feedback, and you should be ready on the intake. The challenge is that all of your customers think that have the best idea for your product. Filter the feedback to make sure your technical team is spending their time on the right things.
 

…entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. - Steve Blank

7. Market: The market changes in real time. While you may have started with 99 competitors, there may be 999 after year 1. It’s on the NTF to stay on top of what’s happening in the market today and what people are building tomorrow.

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required. - Marc Andreessen

8. Outreach (investors, mentors, media, etc): Whether you need money, mentorship or media attention today or not, it’s always a good idea to keep in touch with people in these areas. To get any of them you’ll need strong relationships, which can take a while to build. If you are actively seeking an investment, expect that to take up a majority of your time.

50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. - Mark Suster

9. Hiring: This is arguably the hardest thing to do on this list. These days you have to sell harder to good talent, than you do to raise money. Ask Sonar, a company offering a “zero gravity experience” to new hires, among other things. Perhaps they took “sell the dream” too seriously?
 

The rule of thumb is that it takes 3-6 months to hire a really good person.  - Jason Cohen

10. Culture: Guess who is buying the beer, ordering swag, organizing ping-pong tournaments and arranging hackathons? You better hustle.

Etsy drinks their own kool-aid. Their office and culture embodies their product.