CTO or No-Code?

Do you have customers lined up? Get them first, as they are much harder to find than developers.

I am deeply skeptical of "no-code" tools being powerful enough to build something valuable enough to pay for. Ideally, you teach yourself enough code to build a simple prototype. With the pandemic shutdown, there are tons of online learning resources.

What you need is not a CTO but a good programmer. Ideally, you should hire them; permanent or long-term contract. A CTO is not a role for a two-person company. CTOs don't code, for starters. Once a technical company gets to have about 3 layers of tech workers, that's a good time to hire a CTO.

The other reason to hire is that if you make them a partner, you will be giving up 50% or more of the total equity pie because at this early stage, they are far more important than you, no matte what your ego says. It's entirely legitmate to question what value you bring that entitles you to more than 10-15%. Ideas are cheap. If your programmer is good, they will have opportunties that they will have to put on hold to realize your vision over theirs.

I think you'll eventually need a technical person on your project, but not necessarily in the early days. A few comments / questions that might help:

• Did you validate the idea behind the service yet? If not, I'd think of ways to validate before getting involved in any development.
• Once you've validated the concept, build an MVP to demo it and get more feedback. I think no-code or low-code would be a good choice here. Hiring someone to do this is risky because of scope creep and other issues that may rise from hiring someone who doesn't share your vision.
• Once an MVP is in place, test it with potential users. Collect feature requests on what an ideal solution would look like and then start looking for a CTO / tech co-founder / freelancer to help build a custom solution.

It depends so much on your background. No-code also has a decent learning curve until you're up-to-speed with it.

There are also other options. E.g. (if you can do some code), you could hire a consultant to build something for you, you'd then review their code to get familiar with it (so that you can keep maintaining and evolving it).

Hiring a CTO is a big commitment cause he/she would have quite enough influence on your product and if you're not on the same page, that might collapse your product completely.

If you can build the functionality you need with no code, that can be a good way to develop an MVP if you don’t have coding skills. Then after you validate with paying customers, you can bring on more technical peeps.

If you’ve already validated the idea and have the budget, then bringing someone on board on the tech side could be better as it would free you up to handle other aspects of the business, such as marketing.