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by il 5670 days ago
I would strongly urge you to reconsider your approach and get a technical cofounder. I've seen countless startups founded by nontechnical people outsourcing everything stumble because crucial technical and architecture decisions were made poorly in the beginning.

Outsourcing development seems almost orthogonal to the principles of building a startup-iterating fast, making do with limited resources, etc.

I've done consulting before for some startups that outsourced all development, and although they were run by brilliant business people, everything moved at an incredibly languid pace.Even something as simple as pasting analytics code into their site took several emails to their development team in India and hours of waiting.

And, although I don't know about this from experience, I would assume that lacking a technical founder will severely reduce your chances of getting funded.

1 comments

I 1000% agree with you (this is the author of the article btw). I am constantly in search of a techincal co-founder and I will give equity to the right person, but that takes time. I feel outsourcing can get me to a place to keep the project going until I find the right person. In no way do I see outsourcing as the end all solution :) I have the upmost respect for developers and truly hope that I can find the right fit eventually for Swayable. Thanks for your insight!
My fear for you is that the more you outsource to "get things going", the less likely a capable founder would want to hop on.

Unless you are paying an extreme premium (and you're beyond swimming in investor cash), odds are your system started as a technical nightmare, and is only becoming moreso by the day. As a dev I would be extremely hesitant of hopping on board anything with such a questionable technical past, especially if the product momentum is too high to make a total rework possible.

Have you checked out women 2.0?
That is impossible. No one can agree more than one hundred percent, which by definition is the most that anyone can agree.