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How to be more desirable to potential technical cofounders
by
Carolyn
https://nimblesaas.com/post/how-to-be-more-desirable-to-potential-technical-cofounders
Great advice. I'd agree with most of this. As a tech person, I get propositioned all the time and non-tech founders really go wrong when they only have an idea and no business yet. What's attractive about that? In other words, what is setting you apart from every other person who has a business idea?
Nooooo don't give up equity. Literally so many agencies out there will build your dream w/o needing to get a cofounder that you hardly know.
I wrote about it here on IHers: Stop asking for tech cofounders
When anyone asks me about finding a technical cofounder, I tell them
"Imagine you are a guitarist. Someone comes to you and says "I want to start a band. You play all the music, and I will handle marketing and come up with ideas." Doesn't sound like a very attractive offer right? But what if they say 'I have written 100 songs. Here are my best 3. I also have a email list of 10k people interested in Halloween punk music. I want to start a Halloween punk band. You interested?' The second pitch is way more attractive because the person is bringing something tangible.
Same thing for technical cofounder. Bring prototypes, email lists, money, traction to make yourself more attractive as a partner.
Not just for a 'technical' co-founder, but to get anyone to partner with you, you will need to have more than just a cool idea. Some traction, social media following or even basic prototype built on no-code platform - is bare minimum that you can do. If you are doing something meaningful at a significant scale, you will attract interest.
At that point I will just go get funding and hire a CTO😂
I'd disagree that you have to have a technical co-founder. With the amount of no-code tools available now, you can easily be a solo non-tech founder.
sure, if you just need a generic template (non branding, non differentiated) for your landing page. But what about the actual building of the product, hooking up analytics, generating db queries for monitoring how your users are interacting with your product so that you can data driven decisions?
In my experience, you do need to build, either you (if you can), your tech co-founder/cto, or hire an agency. In the first 2 cases, think long term partnership. In last case, if you have the money (this route can be very costly) and/or you just want an initial throw away prototype to test/validate your features, etc.
Lastly, an idea, in and of itself, is basically worth nothing. Execution (building, selling) is where the value is created.
Hope this helps, cheers!
Not being facetious, but have you seen anyone do this successfully?