I'm really curious about this: for example, the dating app Coffee Meets Bagels. All three founders didn't know how to code. Another example would be the founder of Box, a cloud service company whose founder didn't know how to code.
Then how did they start the companies? You cannot just hire some outsourced programmer right?
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Indian programmers or guys on Fiverr are actually willing to write an app for you for a few $$, but you get what you pay for.
The more complex the application, the more expensive the development costs. A dating app is simple in the end, as the value only comes from 1) the matching algorithm 2) the number of users.
If you don't want to outsource development to the third world, you can hire a local development studio (bit more expensive), hire a programmer and promise him some equity, or even hire an intern. Building the user interface is definitely not rocket science.
Building UI is not rocket science.
Building UX is. It's pure talent driven by powerful intuitive thinking. Hard to find talent for that in India. You need a good Product Manager.
Good UX is underrated. I know enough JS (with frameworks) and HTML/ CSS to get the page to do exactly what I want. Then it looks like garbage at the end of it. I’m fine building out APIs and managing data flow in distributed/ serverless environments. But give me a front end without exactly what is wanted and it won’t come out pretty.
You need a good UX Designer. UX is not really a PM's main focus.
Ideas are all easy to come up with. Execution is everything. Even outside tech- in RE for example yeah I have this badass multifamily development idea.. now all I need is some land that’s undervalued by 50% and a population growth of 20% and my GC to perform perfectly. It’s the same as “the next big app idea”.
Sure, sometimes that works out. You have to get quite lucky getting the right engineers and have outstanding management skills to compensate for lack of ability to understand what’s going on. Not that all founders need to be wizards at front end, backend, devops/ SRE, applied ML.. but having a general understanding of data flow would help.
The most common (and most sensible) route is to partner with a technical co-founder or alternatively raise enough money from friends and family to make a CTO your first hire.
Ultimately it comes down to whether technology is an enabler or a major differentiator for a business: a lot of tech companies aren’t that technologically complex (Coffee Meets Bagel) - while others (Confluent, SpaceX, Palantir) are predicated on having vastly superior technology.
Non-technical founders will often add greater relative value in the former rather than the later category.
Not going to every say a dating app is as complicated as SpaceX or Palantir, but they can get fairy complex with a lot of users. Scaling the technology is hard because humans are inexplicably impatient. Keeping low latency isn’t sending a rocket into space, but it can get messy very quickly with concurrency problems and asynchronous functions and managing database query times at scale.
In a couple days it’s possible to code up an app and hook it up to a basic database. But scaling up is the hard part.
Absolutely - but because it’s much easier to get to an MVP and onboard your first few users, a non-technical founder could manage that process much more easily.
At that point it’s possible to raise funding and then start hiring a proper technology team that can compensate for a founders lack of technical understanding and build a scalable platform.
Vs. a deep tech startup that could take years of R&D before you ship and where technical expertise and domain knowledge is everything.
I'm not "technical" but have run 7-figure dev budgets. It's really not hard once you understand the basics and more about understanding problems & how to think through them as opposed to the technical nitty gritty/execution side of things.
When I started out, I just used outsourced devs (usually garbage), then upgraded to using an American dev firm, and eventually a mix of in-house + outsourced.
Not a tech guy though, this is for eCommerce so YMMV but we do some pretty advanced things on the data/analytics side + martech.
Thanks a lot for the input. Read your Q&A thread and it was helpful.
I am a "technical" individual who has been building a healthcare technology solution through Global UpWork talent for the past 6-months. The best technical talent I have worked with has been Chinese (hardware) and German + Eastern European (software). I pay these individuals, without exaggeration, 10x less than their American counterparts. I am able to do this because I have the technical wherewithal to modularize the components that I need built, contract out the granular work and then I stitch the work products back into the overarching, comprehensive system.
As an example, let's say you want to build an iOS application. If you go on UpWork with all of your business requirements for an iOS application and create a job posting, you're throwing money into the wind. You're asking for an abstraction of technologies and you're paying for someone to do your critical thinking. Critical thinking costs a lot of money. They will have to figure out how to build the three screens that you asked for on the front-end. They will need to standup all of the services / infrastructure on the back-end to facilitate functionality. And they will need to figure out how to stitch the front-end to the back-end. Front-end + back-end talent usually operate in silos (different skill-sets), so you will need to hire an agency. You're going to need deep pockets to go this route.
But what if you understood the architecture of what you are trying to build? Let's say you invested the time to understand the "blueprint" of an end-to-end iOS application. You would be able to delineate front-end from back-end work. Drilling down deeper into the front-end, you would come to understand the MVVM software design pattern and understand how data moves through an application. You'd learn that once a solid MVVM design pattern is put in place, generating screens iOS development is borderline trivial. Objective C & SWIFT skills (the language that iOS applications / screens are written in) are commodity.
Instead of paying $25 - 100K for your prototype, you could pay $1,500 for the front-end. I know this because I just did this. I had 20 individuals submit proposals. The average "non-technical" individual is too abstracted from the actual solution that is being built. As an analogy, you need to BE the General Contractor and sub out the work. You don't need to be the plumber. That's not your job. But you need to know the abstraction of "how plumbing is supposed to work". The end-goal is distilling work deliverables down to functional, commoditized skills. You don't need to be a software engineer to do this.
How did you learn the technical background to even know what tasks to assign like that? Did you study CS in college or did you just do all that research independently?
Damn that is incredibly cool. Do you contract yourself out to do this process for other startups?
They find devs.
Same type of guys that describe themselves as "idea guys", and will offer a generous 2% equity if you can help engineer and develop the whole product, from start to finish.
Like other people have said, you can often outsource development, especially if the tech startup isn't super difficult- I'm a college CS major and I could probably code a tinder knockoff in a weekend if I put my mind to it.
Having worked at a VC though, most of the good ones will see through that. Especially from a top VC fund, they strongly prefer to fund companies where the founder built it or at the very least there is a technical co-founder- these guys have seen enough companies where some business guy thinks their the shit but doesn't know anything about tech, hires developers from India for pennies, and then acts surprised when the product sucks.
Obviously there are examples of successful companies that don't have a tech co-founder, but those are few and far between. Look up any unicorn and I guarantee 99% have a co-founder who built the original thing.
following
there is still a shortage of innovative ideas...and a great idea can attract tech talent that will work for equity if they really agree.
whats your idea?
i thought it was the opposite, plenty of good ideas but not enough execution
its both. if you ask the community for a great idea for a startup, you'd be surprised at how few truly great ideas you would get.
at the same time, there are lots of decent ideas that would take too much work for the idea generator to execute themselves
Wasn't expect this many comments. All great insights.
I asked the question although I'm learning iOS development myself. Given some experience in programming I'm confident, but I am so curious about how non-technical founders did it that I need to ask this question to a group of trusted professionals (I do not mean to flatter...)
Please keep posting your comments. Thanks.
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