tech-company, founder, ctoEveryone I know who isn’t technical themselves has this problem and ask me about this. I honestly don’t know and want to be able to send them a link.
Characteristics of good technical co-founders
Find & Convince
There are two cases:
It’s a very tough sell for you either way. Because, in a nutshell, the only thing a technical founder needs is time to execute his idea. As a non-technical founder, you need to bring in highly credible business savvy, and probably a big wad of cash (out of your pockets, from clients, or from investors).
Much like cute girls on dating sites, potential technical cofounders are in very strong demand. When they’re not working on their own pet projects, they’re busily earning real cash working at real jobs. They won’t be the slightest bit impressed by you approaching them with a vague idea that “just needs a programmer.” Nor will they be impressed by you offering to split their pet project without showing customers or outstanding credentials upfront.
Whether the idea is yours or not, the correct way to approach a technical cofounder is by demonstrating that you know or are able to quickly know who you’d sell the product to, why, how, etc. The person before you has a rational mind and won’t fall for BS, so be sure to have a very clear understanding of the market, of the business model, and of what’s at stake.
To find a cofounder, network. Ask around in your family and friend circles. Try cofounder-related sites that specialize it match-making. (The little I’ve tried them, they were chiefly populated by idea guys who are looking for a technical cofounder, but who knows…) Also use the likes of meetup.com, go to events organized by your chamber of commerce, and so forth.
I’d conclude by echoing @demirb on how “do it yourself” or outsourcing can be a Pandora’s box. You can get lucky. But more often, you’ll end up with a steaming pile of spaghetti that will blow up in your face. The problem, then, is what to do when you find someone willing to jump in and try to salvage something from the mess. The answer: seriously consider recruiting that person as a technical cofounder. Don’t be greedy as you do, because extending a pittance of stock will simply not be enough. Suck it in, and brace yourself to go 50/50 with the right person.
The painful answer is, demonstrate you can:
Pay the business expenses and have a strong marketing war-chest.
More importantly- Actually fund-raise and knock on doors, deal with the insane amount of rejection that you’ll need to live through to close a seed round
It’s a dangerous game to partner with someone you havent known for 1 year. Dangerous, dangerous. Avoid at all costs if you can.
A good technical guy can make a 6-figure salary so he wants to minimize his risk…
The worst possibly thing is being the technical founder and realizing the other guys cannot fundraise or fund or grow the business. Having great ideas doesn’t count. If you aren’t technical, you need to be knocking doors down or getting thousands of users per month. Because $8Gs per month ($100K) is a lot of direct loss.
My advice is to look at your existing connections. This person will be your co-founder. You want to do this with a person you know and trust. Finding a partner is the easy part, building the company together is the hard one.
Only after you find a person you want to build a company with, you should ask yourself how to convince him to join on board. If you know each other well enough and trust each other enough, you have this already half done. The second half is testing your potential. You don’t do this just to convince your partner, you do it to convince yourself that you want to do this. Testing the potential means testing your abilities as a team and the market’s response to what you want to do (talk to target customers, build a landing page to collect emails and test the demand of your idea, plan a prototype, etc.). During this process you will collect evidence of the viability of your startup and if you will have good results, your partner/s will be happy to join to your startup.
THE IDEA DOESN’T MATTER as much as you think. It will probably change during the process of building the company and what matters the most is that you have a team with the set of skills needed for the job. Thats why I think that you should start with finding potential co-founders and only then develop and test the idea.
Note- You can also start testing your idea by yourself and if you will have good results you will be able to find funding/ technical partners but this way you have higher risk of failing because of the wrong team.
Good luck.
Convince them that you’ve got something worth their time!
Why should a good technical guy invest time, money and effort into your project? Is it because you’ve already lined up sales (Hustler?) Is it because your art is absolutely fantastic (Hipster)?
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