I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets:
1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups.
2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care.
3. Managing devs generally requires understanding what's going on. Unless you're ready to hire a CTO with a track record, a non-technical person can't do that.
There's also a long tail-end of reasons. For example, prototyping and tinkering nights and weekends is "free," and can contribute a surprising amount of value. It can't be managed, though; you can't just pay other people to play around, and expect that to be focused in ways which might add value.
*Every* time I've personally seen the playbook of a non-tech founders for a tech startup, it didn't end well.
+10 on point 3. Even as a highly technical CTO, it is shocking what outsourced dev agencies will try to do. I've seen dev agencies try to conclude engagements with a "successfully working app" but havent delivered any source code, or when source code is delivered it cannot actually be compiled into the successfully working app.
As a technical CTO I can smell this a mile away and work it into SoWs, but I wonder how many non-technical co-founders fall into this trap.
When you need updates or Phase II, now the rates go up massively. No one else can change it and the outsourced dev agency now has a monopoly. Usually the non-technical CEO/founder will now have to find a new agency, who might pull the same trick or some variation of it. It can be subtle:
- You have no code
- You have code, but it wont compile
- You have code, it will compile, but not into the version you're declared success with
- You have code to the client/app, but not to the backend
It makes me shudder to think people actually hire dev agencies to build their early stage product. Having worked with some in the past in a different life I absolutely despised those people for being both terrible engineers and people (my experience working with big outsourcing companies).
Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about?
Are there any examples of this working out or are these the 90% of startups that fail?
Personally I’m very technical and I think the best for me would be a partner who is non technical to help me with marketing and sales (something I have no experience in). Would that sort of duo be the best? I can build whatever mobile web backend AI algo shit. That’s easy for me. For my partner I would prefer they are the same level of competence in their side of things.
One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations.
The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical).
He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies.
It was a shitshow.
I had respect for the one chap that basically said "Get back to me, when you know exactly what you want."
I had absolutely zero respect for the agency that said they would deliver a full MVP, in three months.
After that, I just said "Screw this. You'll just get ripped off. I was looking for something to work on, so it might as well be this."
It's been a long process, but we are now in the home stretch. I don't even want to think about how badly he would have been screwed, and I'm quite un-thrilled with the ethics of the folks that claimed they could deliver the app in three months (fairly large-scale backend, and high-quality frontends for mobile clients).
This speaks to me. Around 2012 or so I had a semi-technical friend (PM, could tell when there was a lot of bullshit being thrown around but not a dev by any stretch) with an idea and he needed a Facebook page/app. Remember this was back when people were building a lot of brand experiences inside of their company's FB pages, and this was similar. I quoted about 30-40k. He got a quote from one of these offshore places for about half that and went with them. 60k in billings and change orders later, he comes to me asking for help. It's an absolute shitshow. Code was terrible, absolutely no organization, no error handling, no logging, obviously not a single test anywhere. It was a pretty stereotypical example of offshore devs trying to do as little as possible to show "progress" while billing day rates because everything now was considered a change. Multi-page emails listing out problems and asking for status on 15 different tickets would get a response 23 hours later of "will look into this quickly thank you :)", etc.
I offered to rewrite the entire thing from scratch for a flat rate 15k and some equity but was turned down. Last I heard they were about 100k in by the time it "launched" and it shuttered maybe 6 months later. So this guy burned 100k but more importantly about 2.5 years of his life on this thing while a bunch of terrible devs and a charlatan CEO made off like bandits.
> "Get back to me, when you know exactly what you want."
This is so important if you want to maintain a good relationship. I'm working with a client who has very little money and while the system he wants is almost trivially simple, he's funding it out of his own pocket. After he initially was bouncing from "cool idea" to "cool idea" and had a heart attack at my very reasonable price, I told him to take a step back and write down the most important features and I'd quote that.
He did that, I built it and he loves it. Now he wants version 2 and we're back to the "wouldn't it be great if..." all over again. Sure, it would, but you already said you can't afford all that crap. Now I'm back to the "stop. Think about what you really need, forget the cool IoT features and focus on the basics then get back to me."
Sounds more like you got suckered into working for cheap by someone you know. Unless the app is drastically different than the last CRUD app the firm did, 3 months is plenty of time to run find-replace on a codebase.
It probably would have been quite different, and I guarantee that they would have come up with some bolierplate crap that they had their offshore devs whip up for next to nothing.
The demographic we're Serving has some very particular needs, they don't have much money (501c3 means nonprofit, if you are not familiar with the designation), but there's tremendous sensitivity in how the data is handled, and also in how the UI is presented. Small features will make (or break) the app.
Long story, and not one I'm particularly interested in sharing, at the moment.
It's all good.
BTW: I'm not working for "cheap." I'm working for free. I'm enjoying it.
I read it he volunteered to work for cheap for a friend, out of charity, or pity even. Your second sentence I don't quite understand, you mean the original shop did a bad job? Well, yes.
>> Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about?
Because people dismiss engineers as low-value, until they painfully realize otherwise. It is the same reason Google/Facebook/Stripe did so well compared to other companies -- because Google/Facebook/Stripe realized the strategic value of engineers and compensated them well and aligned with long-term interests. Other companies cut Engineers and constantly squeezed them until they realized (too late) that they had no strategic power left. The stock market over the past two decades is a fantastic A/B test on people strategy and success.
To be realistic, there is one good reason to outsource dev -- it is to very quickly get a demo-able MVP so you can get funding. You have to recognize that the demo-able MVP is most likely throw-away and you have to be ready to re-build from scratch once you get funding for your own team.
I've consulted in this sort of role for a startup which hired a dev agency. A few months in, we were behind schedule. I've asked them access to their git repo and built some graphs with the commits and LOC changes of every dev we paid for. It became clear that these devs were working on multiple other assignments and were not really dedicated to us. Without these sort of insights, it's hard to judge if they are honest or not.
- For slightly more legal protection, the code should be in YOUR OWN git repo, not the dev agency's repo
- If you are giving some upfront $ or milestone payment, you should also contractually now own the code up to that point in time
- You should not declare a milestone success (and should not pay) until you can independently compile the app straight from git (front end and backend) (Also, watch out for hard-coded domains where you are secretly pointing to their backend and not to your independently compiled one)
- App QA should ONLY be on the version of the app where you compiled/deployed the full stack yourself
- You should deploy the app into your own cloud to ensure you actually have all the pieces. Super extra credit: Build Terraform/Ansible/Chef into the SoW and final payment should depend on deployment into your own environment by YOU (not the agency)
- You should learn how to build/compile/deploy yourself or hire an independent person (not the devs) who can do this for you
In general, I agree. There is enormous hidden equity in being a technical co-founder that is unappreciated until non-technical founders are burnt several times.
That said, I did present two ideas for those who want to venture into this:
- You recognize that the "success" you have in the working app isnt actually a success and plan accordingly
- You hire someone independent who keeps the third parties honest
Another one:
- You cut corners, get a working demo, raise good VC funds and hire a well-compensated technical co-founder or founding engineer who is compensated sufficiently to be happy short term and has sufficient equity to want long term success
Oh yes, there's so many things that you should do. This was only to grasp the code they were doing. You need a technical advisor who is on your side and can challenge the dev agency. You also need to strike a balance between giving them some slack and fighting to get a solid solution. We relied on the dev agency until we got the initial 2mln investment, afterwards we hired internal devs who took over. But if we scared them too much we might have compromised the investment.
100% agree. I've yet to see a startup succeed w/o a technical co-founder. I do angel investments and have never cut a check to a founding team w/o checking for the above checklist. For teams with good founding CTOs, they get it for free if the person is sharp about process.
But the whole discussion was what non-technical founders would do, and this is probably the second-best advice I could give. Moreso, to recognize the myriad risks and understand things arent quite as easy as posting a project on Upwork.
The first-best advice I could give is to get a technical co-founder.
> I've seen dev agencies try to conclude engagements with a "successfully working app" but havent delivered any source code, or when source code is delivered it cannot actually be compiled into the successfully working app.
The recliner I bought 2 years ago has an iOS app that basically works, but has many flaws. It's clear the company does not have the source code. The developer, in the app store, has a name with Chinese characters and the company is based in the US. It was right after the pandemic, that I bought it, and complained to their support. I was still in the window of returning it for a full refund, so they told me "we'll get right on that" and fix the problem I reports. Almost 2 years later and not a single update to the app.
EDIT: company is Human Touch, chair is the Gravis ZG.
So, if it's very hard to start a software company based on paying contractors for software development -- which seems true to me -- there's another warning here for software contractors/consultants.
If someone is paying you, as contracting engineering talent for hire on a consulting/hourly/iteration basis, to develop an app or product they hope will be the foundation of a new business -- chances are high this won't actually work out for them (despite your competence and best efforts), and chances are high they will end up angry at you for taking so much of their money to develop something that didn't end up developing the business they wanted, with possibly legal action to try to claw back some of those funds.
I have some personal observation of this. Even doing work agilely with review every two weeks and the client only paying once they've reviewed and approved the work in that two week period, and approved your work plan for the next two week period, even with all that -- after a year or two they can still threaten or carry out legal action to try to claw back of some or all of the money they've paid you.
So, these can be very dangerous clients. And that you are trying to do your best and give them a quality product -- you aren't trying to exploit them or take advantage of them, you think you were delivering what they asked for (if they asked for the wrong things is that on you? turns out, they may think it is) -- will not necessarily keep you out of these difficulties.
Oh absolutely. Twice I made the mistake of coming onto a startup to fix the “mess” the previous dev shop had made.
Both times the founders had developed an incredibly negative relationship with their dev shop. Hell, the company with the Series A was withholding payments, the preseed company at least paid their bills.
I naively thought “of course they hate working with a dev shop, the incentives are wrong. I’m FTE with percentage points equity. I’ll fix it.”
Of course, things got better, but growth stalled or never happened, blame gets shifted, suddenly that founder who was excited to hire top tier talent is very disappointed in the very equity and salary expensive engineer you are. You end up being the new target of their animosity. You start to empathize with the folks in India, China, Ukraine or Argentina whose history lingers in the git blame. They’re not stupid, the incentives were just wrong!
The thing is…the CEO who failed to find a technical co-founder, retain them, or replace them with the same equity agreement has already demonstrated their inability to work with technical people. If they are coming from tech, the fact that they couldn’t convince a former colleague to work with them means they’ll be a terrible manager. If they come from finance, as many founders do, you are a line item.
At the end of this, hopefully sooner than later, you’ll quit, you’ll get fired, or you’ll collect paychecks while looking for the next better thing.
> If they are coming from tech, the fact that they couldn’t convince a former colleague to work with them means they’ll be a terrible manager.
I kind of disagree here. I have been a manager at F*NG and just below those places in terms of pay, and getting my guys to jump to a startup without market fit, for the pay that those types of places tend to offer, I don't see how they would make the jump. The product/idea would have to be VERY enticing for this to happen, while for me personally, a CTO title would be enticing enough to maybe roll the dice on something.
Well, in this scenario, you are actually the 'former' colleague getting recruited to be a co-founder while the other folks stay stable. You just admitted you would and I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PM or even another engineer who would want to join forces. That's different than a complete stranger recruiting you -- I would be very wary.
This was a real scenario I faced and the company/founder was a complete stranger to me- I forget if he just found me on LinkedIn or it was through angel list- I would not have been a cofounder just their CTO. Either way I ended up taking another offer with somewhat lower risk- they were extremely successful but turnover there was on the order of 25% per year. And I did end up taking some people with me and lasted about 5 years there so it all worked out.
I check in to see if the other company ever made it anywhere and nothing ever comes up so I guess I wasn't missing out on startup riches.
Be nice but remember you have objective skills and you need to suss out the CEOs objective skills.
1) Can they raise money? Proof is good here. Sometimes someone will say "I want you as my co-founder to go and raise my seed round" and you can condition leaving your current job on getting at least some checks in. Remember, this founder _knows_ you can deliver the goods, you are an employed software engineer. Can they?
2) Can they recruit? The process might be a mess but are they treating your time and concerns with respect?
3) Do they view you as an equal partner? Make sure you nail down exactly what they want. If they want a true co-founder, ask for 50%. If they don't, make sure you understand what it means to be an employee to a non-technical founding team.
In general of course you're right, and this is a very good point.
> Even doing work agilely with review every two weeks and the client only paying once they've reviewed and approved the work in that two week period, and approved your work plan for the next two week period, even with all that -- after a year or two they can still threaten or carry out legal action to try to claw back of some or all of the money they've paid you.
But I would've thought that way of doing things, sounded pretty ironclad. If in every fortnightly review of progress so far, they thought things were going well, how did they end up retroactively changing their mind after a year? Can you go into a little more detail about how things went wrong? Was it a case of 'they were a startup selling waterproof teabags, you built them an online store, turns out there is no market for waterproof teabags, and they were looking for someone to blame'?
OT, but I thought I'd ask, since you seem to have experience with this sort of work...
In your experience, is it possible to negotiate work at a rate where one would only be working 2d / wk? I'd imagine it's hard to negotiate such an agreement with a company because they want work done on a faster timeline?
Sure, probably. I worked briefly for a small (2-5 engineer, plus designers, and administrative) consultancy that did web app development; we had multiple clients at once, some clients got two FTE days a week of our time or less, sure. So I don't see why it shouldn't be possible. (Whether you can charge enough to live off of 2 days a week of work, I don't know, and depends on your living standard and location!)
But there's a lot of work that isn't your hourly billable that goes into running such a business too, administrative overhead, client relationship management/development, etc.
I personally ultimately decided this kind of consultancy was not work I found rewarding. I also was not one of the owners/principals, and was not there very long, so I'm not really an expert in this kind of business, and probably there are people who might be better to give you advice. But since you asked.
For contract work in general, both technical and non-technical, the answer really is "it depends."
Sometimes a company really does need something yesterday and you're the bottleneck in getting something released/getting revenue/etc. Bit I've also taken on writing and video projects for example that were components of a marketing campaign that was scheduled to launch some months down the road so it was a pretty part-time thing. Mostly I've worked on internal projects but the same principle applies.
Maintenance work can easily be negotiated at this schedule. For example, you can launch a project, and then stay on "retainer" for 5 hours a week for bug fixes. If you find a few projects like this it could meet your criteria.
With new feature development it would be harder. But you could negotiate a weekly fee based on a 4 day work week, and then get so good and efficient that you do the work in 3 days.
So I'm no expert, I only worked in this area briefly and not as the business owner. And don't work in consulting anymore because I didn't appreciate the kind of work it was, so I'm biased. And I didn't say it was a "bad" kind of client/project, I said it was dangerous.
But other kinds of clients include:
* An existing successful business which needs more development or a new project
* An enterprise which needs things for internal use
* Universities, or non-profits
* Government contracting
If you are going to be developing for a software startup, being aware of the risk may help you manage it. Do _you_ think they have a possibly successful business, does it make sense to you? Of course, maybe you can't judge that, it's not like you're in the business of judging startup potential and it's not like that's easy. But does the founder seem to know what they are doing? Again, you may not be able to judge, but if you get a bad feeling it may not be worth it -- or if you get a bad feeling while in the middle, you may want to find a way to fire your client. (Even though it's hard to give up the money).
Will they be the kind of client that wants to tell you exactly what to implement and have you do exactly what they say? Or will it be a partnership where they identify requirements but trust you to work out some details? Either can be risky, but it turns out "we implemented exactly what you told us to implement" isn't always enough to stop them from blaming you for their failure, and I think in some cases can paradoxically make it worse.
I don't think they necessarily need to be technical. But there is a huge advantage to being a person that can just roll up their sleeves and do pretty much anything that needs to be done, whatever it is. It does not have to be technical. It is a mindset of being open to researching stuff, trying to figure things out, accepting and learning from failures and doing 20% to get 80% of benefit.
A person with this kind of mindset will IMO almost inevitably become at least a little bit technical. Just enough to be dangerous and look silly a bit when they are out of their depth. I have enormous respect for people like that when they dive in into application development with no prior coding experience or can understand complex development ideas because they are truly open and willing and working to understand rather than put artificial barriers before them.
As a technical founder, I agree with you to a degree, but not completely. I've come to appreciate sharp, non-technical founders with business acumen and who can see the "forest for the trees". There are times where being "technical" is actually a crutch, because you're more likely to:
1. Waste time / obsess over small technical details that in the grand scheme of things don't really matter, or at the very least, don't matter until you have validated product market fit. These details can be anything, from the design or shape of a button, or the perfect fully-normalized schema for your database or whatever.
2. You over-engineer technical solutions, like building a homegrown SaaS app or fleshing out a database for something that should have been validated inside of Google Sheets or email.
3. Idea generation - because they are non-technical, they often see potential products where technical people won’t because the technical person overestimates the amount that a non-technical person will commit to solving a problem. If you asked a technical person how to do XYZ, they might say something like, "oh that's easy, just set up a ABC server and VPN into it and run this bash script and blah blah blah". A sharp non-technical founder would immediately sense that to the average person this is absurd, and thus a potential product opportunity. I see this particular bias all the time on Hacker News.
It is a bit like saying there is a risk to having technical knowledge and the risk is that the guy will actually try to use it.
You can't have a person that is an expert in everything. The best you can hope for is to have a person that is an expert in a key area for your business and then intelligent enough to be able to cover for a lot of additional stuff and wise enough to understand and work around his limitations.
For example, if I was non-technical founder but we decided to divide responsibilities so that technical matters are still my area, I would make sure to use whatever technical knowledge I have primarily to hire good technical people and to check their claims.
In a lot of modern startups, software development and business development are two key areas so it makes sense to have two founders, one with technical chops and another understanding business development. But that's not always how things play out in real life.
One thing is that there is a lot of range for "non-technical". We can be talking about non-technical person being able to understand how AI works in principle and what it can or cannot do but not being able to do anything in practice or write a line of code. Or a person that doesn't appreciate programming at all and has not even slightest clue to how computers work.
Someone needs to be technical or they’ll get hit by a number of problems which are almost always fatal: consulting companies (especially the large ones) will take them for a ride, burning budget and likely failing to deliver something viable; they are likely to make bad hires because it’s hard to tell people who can’t deliver or, more commonly, who aren’t capable of building what the business needs right now; and the more general version of that last point, someone needs to be making sure that you’re building something secure, reliable, etc. which is compatible with both your budget and the kind of app you’re building.
That doesn’t strictly have to be a technical cofounder but if not that’s a significant degree of trust placed on an early hire.
Which is to say there are upsides to being expert in the field.
The question is whether every company requires technical people to run the company just because they need an app to sell their services.
One theory is that in future every company will be a technical company -- because merciless competition will favour companies driven by technical, scientific mindset. But I don't think we are there yet.
I think this really comes back to the question of how custom your technology needs are. My local coffee shop has a website and apps but the owner doesn't need to be a programmer because they have the _exact_ same needs as everyone else, and something like ToastTab can be licensed and used without modification. The same is true of a lot of online stores where their business is conceptually very similar to many others.
If your business is less like that, however, I do think it's critical to find someone you have a high degree of trust will make reasonable calls. Once you start needing things like custom development you're saying that technology is core to your business. That doesn't mean the CEO needs to be a techie any more than the CEO of a restaurant chain needs to be a chef but they definitely need someone whose judgement the CEO respects.
> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets:
I've seen two types of non-technical founders that stood a chance:
- The industry insider who knows exactly what problem to solve, and who can sell the solution effectively. For example, I saw a woman who had closed $500k of revenue by month 3. She knew everyone in her niche. That kind of product/market fit will gloss over a lot of other problems.
- The hustler who learns enough Rails (or whatever) to glue together a prototype. Here, you're looking at a non-technical founder with basically "boot camp" coding skills. This works best in markets where the basic tech is easy, but the business depends on (say) deal-making abilities. For example, two-sided marketplaces are technically easy, but you need to get two different groups of people to the table.
There are a lot of "non-technical" founders out there who aren't especially good at the non-technical part of their business, either. But non-technical founders who really understand their market and who can act their company's first salesperson? They have options, especially in smaller B2B niches where outsiders don't even know where to start.
You've still got to be careful working for the industry insider. You don't know the industry, and so you don't know how realistic their expectations are until it's too late.
I just finished a stint with a bootstrapped startup whose co-founder had decades of experience in the industry and a lot of connections. He has a pre-existing software business in the same industry with modest revenue (<$1mil) that he is trying to use to fund the next giant breakthrough.
His problem is that he completely failed at market research and sincerely believes there are no solutions already in the market, because there weren't when he first had the idea a decade ago. I believed him at first, but the better I came to know the industry the more venture-backed startups I found that were solving the same problem and already had substantial market penetration. Any time I would show him one of these he would insist that our product was so much better that we would blow them away when we reached market.
The same founder also struggles with the concept of an MVP (which seems common for grand-vision CEOs), so nearly three years after I joined they still haven't released the new product. In the meantime, the largest venture-backed alternative has become the standard in the industry. The founder is still convinced that his idea will win out, but I'm glad to be out of there.
I do the dirty tasks for a non-technical founder. Everybody he hires for a task does heavy corner cutting. Technical debt is enormous. Details are not taken care of. I like the guy, so I help him ignoring cost of opportunity. I do all the plumbing and fixing the tiny details and changes at 2 am. But that’s not sustainable. That’s not the way to build a business with prosperous future.
Totally empathize with you and I've been there. At some point, it does make sense to exit amicably in these situations. My experience has been that the non-technical founder will see things as they truly are, eventually.
At that point, you can re-establish another engagement where things are budgeted for a balance of speed and longevity.
To be fair, there is a purpose for Technical Debt and for cutting corners, esp for MVPs or demos. But it has to be a balance and the cost of the debt carry has to be appreciated.
The best way to become a tech entrepreneur is either to start incredibly wealthy, or build a product yourself. I wince at the number of non-technical folks that have deluded themselves into thinking that they can "do the business side of things" when in reality that means bringing nothing to the table, save their money.
OP's case is a warning to these folks. He actually brought negative, not zero, value to his startup because he grossly misread the market he was trying to enter. I worked at TripAdvisor for a while on their tours product, and even years ago we were already doing what OP was talking about.
> when in reality that means bringing nothing to the table, save their money.
The big problem is that founders have a really hard time understanding just how cheap ideas are, so they sincerely believe that they are bringing 90% of the company's value. They look at the big successes and assume that the process went something like this:
* Founder has an idea
* Founder recruits a bunch of people to build the idea
* Customers come because the idea is so great
* Founder walks away incredibly wealthy
What they never see is the dozens of companies that attempted and failed to execute the exact same idea in the decade before the big success.
Fair enough, but my level of skepticism for non-technical founders WITH deep pockets isn’t much better:
1. Deep pockets can mean a non-viable business model can survive longer before going completely bust, simply because the founder can afford to continue shoveling money into the furnace, and build the illusion of success.
2. If the deep pockets are the results of inherited wealth of some sort, many of these founders are just engaging in success laundering where the startup is really a shitty business but its existence implies an alternative story for how their wealth was obtained and gives the prestige of appearing “self made”. Or the founder doesn’t care about the business at all and just wants the title of “entrepreneur”.
3. Often a deep pocketed non-tech founder’s only tool for solving tech problems is money, which doesn’t lead to truly innovative solutions.
> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets:
A relative of a friend is a Dr. that had a good idea for a useful product and hired a consultant to build it. After about 18 months and a little over $1M had been invested, the consultant wanted more money and I got pulled in to review everything. What I found was:
1. Work was farmed to an offshore team that made terrible technical decisions and were unable to produce working software
2. Consultant and the offshore team took many detours to increase scope and add lots of new, useful features. Of course, they did this before completing existing ones, so the result was a bloated application with about 20 features at the 80% state. Only logging in actually worked.
3. Too much infrastructure too early. High availability, redundant infrastructure up and running at AWS for a cool $10-15k/month. Keep in mind the product hadn't even gotten to MVP and that's also close to the $20k/month my own startup was spending at AWS for a messaging app for full geo-redundancy w/over 2M active users and capable of handling 1B messages/month.
In short, the Dr. got taken for a huge ride. My advice was to make sure that they were able to get their hands on all of the source code and other IP and then wind it all down.
> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets:
Even if you're a technical founder you should be sceptical about your own idea and putting all your eggs in one basket, and being played by VCs who spread all their eggs over different baskets.
VCs (venture capitalists) tend to invest in many different companies that stand a very small chance of success. Because they spread out their risk, they can make quite a lot of money from the rare success. Founders who go all in on a single idea, on the other hand, will most likely fail.
I think the reality is Startups are hard enough as-is and non-technical solo founders are doing something already difficult with one hand tied behind their back. The successful ones I’ve seen almost always operate in a domain where they’re subject-matter experts so while they’re not technical they have a deep understanding of the problem and can communicate it clearly to a developer.
It’s also more difficult these days to be a non-technical founder because hiring technical staff is still challenging despite all the layoffs. I’ve seen them make some really bad hires.
And from experience, a technical person still needs some deep pockets to really take an idea to it's potential. Personally I forget that selling and marketing is a massive overhead that is generally not solvable by some clever code and long/hard work.
Software development is much more expensive than people predict, including software developers.
Let's say you're paying $200/hour to a software consultancy -- which isn't as much as it sounds, the engineers doing the work will not be making anything close to HN-bragging-level of take-home at that rate, although they'll be doing okay.
120,000 is 600 hours of work at $200/hour billed. So that might be two engineers working about 8 weeks.
Does two engineers working 8 weeks seem so crazy for developing a novel app, full-stack from back-end to design? Not at all.
Software is expensive.
Which means, sure, there's plenty of money in developing it!
Sure. Nevertheless, the "App development" budget for a startup with no users/clients should be $0, otherwise it's not a start-up, but more of a start-middle.
For sure you don't want to spend that kind of money without customers/clients yet. The problem with a software-based startup is... software development is expensive.
Not that contractors will rip you off charging too much for shoddy work -- although that happens, software is expensive even when it doesn't.
If you are paying a consultancy for the software development, you should probably plan on spending six figures in consultancy invoices to even get an MVP -- if you mean an actually working app by "MVP". That's not a lot at all. So... up to you to figure out how to verify your business model before you do that (with an "MVP" that isn't actually a working app yet perhaps), or have a business plan that accommodates it.
At least 70K spent on development before a penny in bookings - and probably closer to 100K given the relative 2020 vs. 2021 bookings. Absolutely insane, and it's no wonder this guy lost almost a quarter million.
It really depends. And there are some huge advantages to being a non-technical founder. Two are that a) you are a domain expert, and that expertise is more valuable than technical expertise, and b) you are less susceptible to analysis-paralysis (generalizing I know as that's more a personality trait)
My friend and colleague is non-technical and launched a very successful app. I acted as a virtual CTO and recruiter contract developers. My total hours on the project is <100. While non-technical, my colleague is a professional designer and has domain expertise.
All of those are true, but there's another important reason I think is worth adding: the only way go get truly better at something is to do it over and over again, and most technically adapt people have a long string of side projects, experiments, etc. A lot of them are not great, but the act of attempting to create them and seeing them in real life gradually helps one to have a practiced feeling about what ideas are worth pursuing and what ideas are not worth pursuing.
If someone has never gone though that idea->attempted implementation->post mortem loop, it's very likely that they haven't developed a good muscle for coming up with good ideas. They just sit around babying whatever idea is currently in their head, never really challenging it.
(for what it's worth, this idea is something I first encountered in one of interviews in Founders at Work - I just really like the idea)
I can't help but agree. Technology is hard to grasp without study. Study takes time, which founders don't have. People with technical expertise are expensive. If you don't have the expertise yourself, you have to hire it.
He's got 200k and he's bled 125k of that just to make his MVP. That's utterly insane to me.
App studios are often quoting high prices though. I have no idea about app development, but I regularly hear about quotes for relatively simple apps (i.e. you could do it with Wordpress and a custom theme as a web app) that are 30-50k euros. I don't know if these agencies just make insane profits or if they really make everything super complicated and need three developers working for a month to produce a simple crud app.
There's always a nuance, and I laugh when people tell me 'this is relatively simple'. It often seems like it can be done with wordpress but if the client is fixed that the app MUST function in a way that wordpress doesn't accommodate... well then the costs go up dramatically to rebuild some form of wordpress but not using wordpress...
I often like to present things in terms of costs alternatives to my clients. IF it MUST be done with that feature it will cost X dollars to build it that way. If we remove that feature or do this alternative approach we can bring the cost down to Y where Y is much cheaper. It takes a good technical person who is business minded to be able to see these win/win scenarios though. 99% of the time people choose the cheaper option when they find out it can be done for 10K instead of 50K.
Its one of the reasons why you need a good technical cofounder who is ALSO familiar with business strategy to be able to choose from alternatives instead of doing whatever the business guy insists has to be done.
Sure, complicated things can increase costs, but my impression is that a lot of the apps don't need to be "real apps", because they don't do anything mobile specific, they could be a webview + Wordpress because they're delivering content managed in a CMS, and plenty of them don't even work in airplane mode.
A company I work for just bought another company and I was asked to help them on their feet with their website. It's pretty much a standard Wordpress with a custom theme and maybe 300 lines of custom code in plugins. Their agency billed them north of 50k euros.
I can tell they got ripped off because there's just nothing there that could conceivably take anywhere near that much work. I have little insight in the app-making process, so I can't tell if everything is just super complicated or app agencies just say "okay, this should be about 50 hours, let's quote 500 hours in case the client changes their mind on some details".
The basic pitch that I've heard a (competent) app development shop make was, "Look, we have a reputation for doing this right. And it's cheaper to pay us to develop an app than it is to open up a coin laundromat."
I'm not sure if it's actually a good idea for a solo, non-technical founder to hire an app shop like that. Too many founders are deluding themselves, and will just lose all their money no matter what they do. But if you're the sort of founder who can get several B2B customers to sign non-binding letters of intent saying, "Yes, we would totally buy X if it actually existed", then those app development costs would be totally reasonable.
Non-technical people have no idea what is possible, no idea what they actually need and no understanding of the SDLC.
I've seen people running organizations of less than 5 people that just need a landing page and a gallery, insist that WordPress cannot possibly address their needs and hire custom web development for $$$.
Those agencies deserve the money they get for all the hassle they put up with IMHO.
They probably need to factor in some percentage of people not paying or suing them in their pricing, which is a shame, because it increases the cost for customers who pay on time, know what they want, and accept responsibility if the thing doesn't work out.
I think the fact that somebody wants to start a tech company without the fundamental skills itself is a red flag. Screams to me that they can't be that serious about the company or they would at least dedicate the time to either networking to get a technical cofounder or learn rudimentary programming skills themselves
I am coming at this from the opposite end (tech founder looking for a partner to handle the business side). As a technical person, I can build all the features; fix all the bugs; and work on performance issues. But I lack the skills needed to find the right market fit and convince customers to jump on board.
I think the best startups are co-founded by a bright technical person and a savvy business partner. The pattern of Apple which was started by the 'Two Steves' (Jobs and Wozniak) can be a really successful one and one that I would like to follow (https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-job...)
This or that non-technical person finding a technical co-founder while not being realistic about the stake each provides to the company. Ideas are worthless (infinite numbers of them are forgotten every day), executing ideas is what has the potential for realizing value.
I have seen so many people who do realize they need a technical partner, but arrive at the table thinking the valuable asset is the idea.
This is why AI assisted app development will help tremendously in reducing the cost for startup founders. It will certainly reduce the number of hours required to develop an app and businesses should not run out of money trying to develop one.
>> high level of skepticism towards non-technical founders
For web app / software businesses for sure. It's worth noting that most entrepreneurs don't sell software. I'm talking by # of businesses, not market cap.
Nontechnical micromanaging founder demands feature goes live by end of day, find another job if you reply with impotent nerd excuses. Tomorrow will be the same, you will not be circling back to clean anything up.
It may be strategically or tactically acquired, but tech debt is fundamentally a business decision.
1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups.
2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care.
3. Managing devs generally requires understanding what's going on. Unless you're ready to hire a CTO with a track record, a non-technical person can't do that.
There's also a long tail-end of reasons. For example, prototyping and tinkering nights and weekends is "free," and can contribute a surprising amount of value. It can't be managed, though; you can't just pay other people to play around, and expect that to be focused in ways which might add value.
*Every* time I've personally seen the playbook of a non-tech founders for a tech startup, it didn't end well.