[Alex3917]

> Also, worst case, the project fails but the technical skills I acquired make me more marketable for tech-type jobs.

This. The chances of hiring folks to build an MVP and getting enough paying users off that to bring them on full time or getting enough traction to raise money are absurdly small. If you're already both very wealthy and are the single most famous person in your industry then maybe there's like a 10% chance of it working, if neither of those things apply then the chances are much closer to 0%. What will happen is that you'll spend a ton of money to build something, not really validate any assumptions or de-risk anything, and then be stuck with this poorly constructed prototype that's too complicated for you to modify yourself.

Spend six months learning to code, then try to build your product. If you're not making progress at a reasonable pace then just get a job as a full stack developer and spend a couple years learning from the best people in the industry while getting paid for it, and then finish your prototype on nights and weekends. After a couple years of working professionally as a developer, things that would have taken you a month you'll now be able to do in a day.

[ackbar03]

I would tend to agree with this but there are also stories of successful non technical co-founders who managed to pull it off, although it could be selection bias. Airbnb is an obvious one but another example is DiDi in China. Their story was pretty crazy, they outsourced the production to a third party and that company outsourced it to another company who apparently found some university professor who asked his grad students to build it as an assignment or something. Then they took the shitty app and ran around trying to get investors and I guess in the end they pulled it off

[nicholas73]

"The chances of hiring folks to build an MVP and getting enough paying users off that to bring them on full time or getting enough traction to raise money are absurdly small."

What about the chances if you build yourself? Any better?

[dragonwriter]

> What about the chances if you build yourself? Any better?

If you have the skill to build yourself you avoid (really, reduce by some amount) the portion of the risk attached to getting people to build it (skill and counterparty and other risks) but you still have the market risk.