What advice would you give to someone who has a great idea but doesn't have the skills to build it?

Share your idea in public (here, in blog, in Twitter; in niche groups related to your industry etc.) and see the actual traction and if someone indeed find it great. Seek a genuine advice on how to improve it.

If you worried that someone steals your idea, then it's better to change your mindset. If it's a great idea, someone will steal it anyway sooner or later. If that what it takes to destroy your future company, there's no reason to invest time into building it in the first place.

In short, you need to validate your idea before going too much. Expect that this idea won't work out and you'll need to pivot multiple times before you find your audience and form your value proposition.

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Also, use simple tools to shape the vision of the future product:

• yep.so for landing and waitlist (it'll guide you through questions)
• tally.so and typeform.com — for surveys
• canva.com and figma.com — for design
• notion.so for simple text-based landings and management

It's much easier to sell both to your clients and future team when you have a visual and/or simple page about the future product

You have three options:

1. Hire someone to build it.
2. Learn how to build it.
3. Partner with someone you has the skill to build it.

Each has there own challenges. The first option is the easiest but it's not cheap.

Learning to build a product is more cost effective, but it takes time and effort. Also, it can be difficult and discouraging if that isn't your strength. No code solutions can make it a bit easier, especially if you just need a simple MVP.

The third option is usually the most preferable, but also may be the most difficult. If all you have is the idea, you're probably just wasting you time looking for a technical partner. If you can validate your idea first that might help. For instance, if you can get people to pay for the solution before it's built (perhaps manually performing the function behind the scenes) you may increase your odds.

Best of luck.

Find a way of validating your idea without building it.

That may seem like dumb advice but can you gain credible support (ideally financial commitment) from potential customers or create a manual process that tests and validates your idea?

There are builders who are looking for projects & a validated idea is more attractive.

Find great co-founders.

• Find new friends that want to work on that idea (co-founder)
• Try to sell the idea to someone
• Learn the only the necessary skills that you need to do an MVP

There are many developers who are well versed in the development process. Explain your idea to them, they provide the best solution for development

Unfortunately there's no easy or quick answer here. You have to figure out where you want to fit into all of this.

If you would like to be able to build your own products, you have to start the journey learning to design/code. If building products isn't where your interests or talents lie, you may want to hire someone to build it or partner up with someone who can bring it to life.

Before going down either of those roads, you might try validating the idea first. Get a simple landing page together (at Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress) and try to synthesize what problem your product would solve. Add an email subscription form to start building an email list, and then start having convos with folks.

Validating the idea will save you a lot of time and money and is probably something you can do even if you don't have the skills to build the full idea yet.