I think, and maybe here I'm stating the obvious, that a big problem is how people sometimes think that their idea is the real deal, while the implementation is just a matter of paying somebody.
I think that most people don't realize that most ideas aren't original, and that if you think of something, just by sociological statistics, most likely somebody else has already thought of it.
So what really matters isn't a detailed plan, but a person who builds it well.
Making a very good programmer a technical co-founder is probably the best move.
Giving away 30% of your startup, but locking in a very good technical person, is probably going to give you more success than that 30% that you wanted to keep.
Maybe somebody can point at some statistics, but I feel like that it shouldn't be difficult to have a rough idea of the success rate of technical founders' startups vs non-technical founder ones.
My experience is that usually people haven't actually thought their ideas through. Not even the parts that are within their grasp to imagine and design. In trying to implement stuff, or just in preplanning discussions, you as the programming are always asking, "So what about here? What should happen in this case?" And then there's a pause making it clear the person has never considered this, then they throw out an answer like they had thought about it. But after a little while their answers start to contradict, and their idea is not even conceptually possible.
Looking through the list of Hi-tech companies on Wikipedia [1], almost every single company that lists founders' backgrounds have technical founders. Of course the common statistical caveats apply.
I think that most people don't realize that most ideas aren't original, and that if you think of something, just by sociological statistics, most likely somebody else has already thought of it.
So what really matters isn't a detailed plan, but a person who builds it well.
Making a very good programmer a technical co-founder is probably the best move.
Giving away 30% of your startup, but locking in a very good technical person, is probably going to give you more success than that 30% that you wanted to keep.
Maybe somebody can point at some statistics, but I feel like that it shouldn't be difficult to have a rough idea of the success rate of technical founders' startups vs non-technical founder ones.