[camwiese]

How would you propose the non-technical founder raising funding without a product? Personally, I can sell the vision all day long, but people want to see a product. Any advice for non-technical founders who want to raise "idea" funding to pay a developers salary?

[joshglick]

There are two options and they both sound kind of cliched. 1)

1) The first is two find some way to "hack" together a product yourself. This can be as simple as a "demo" in keynote/powerpoint or something that you can show off to investors as the product initially. Or if you are in a service business, perform the service manually for a few customers (run it from a spreadsheet) and prove the need before plunging into full fledged development. Both of those will most likely also reduce the time-footprint of your development

2) A lot of accelerators seem to be accepting pre-product companies these days and I think this is the strength of a lot of the accelerators is to get you into the product stage. These could be a viable option if you have one in your area

[dagw]

I know it isn't really helpful advice as such, but have a great track record and a great network. I worked for this one, non-technical, guy on a couple of companies (as an employee, not a co-founder), and while I don't know exactly how he did it, he had list of people whom it seemed he could just call up and get a few $100k in investment from whenever he needed it. Of course this was far from his first company, he had years and dozens of companies (of varying degrees of success) behind him.

[SparksZilla]

Honestly, I don't know anybody who has done this. Zach, Carrie, and I moonlighted on LaunchGram before it was LaunchGram. We'd leave our day jobs / school and meet up to work because we were so excited about building this product. Selling the vision means selling potential co-founders on working on the thing at night with you for a bit. Thoughts?