| I disagree. I've found in my experience it's far easier in theory for a business guy to attract a technology co-founder than the other way around. This insight isn't clear from the outside due to a) the existence of "business" guys who do no business and complain vocally and b) the existence of tech+some business guys who know enough business to get their product off the ground and then find a good business guy to balance them out. Every purely tech guy I've seen come to me looking for a co-founder, I've had to tell them I could help you find one but you'd basically have to throw away all your code and start again from scratch. For the tech guys for which their code is their baby, this is not a welcome message and they instead go find someone else to tell them how they've made the best mousetrap in the world. Here's how to be a non-technical co-founder that makes tech guys excited and willing to hop on board: * Articulate a vision that's broad, compelling and unique. Filter tech guys by the ones who are already excited by that vision rather than trying to convince them away from their pet cause. * Become so educated in the field that you can confidently answer any of the tech guy's questions and that you can educate and provide insight into the field from the very start of the conversation. * Talk to customers, find ones for who this is a hair on fire problem, take a short video of those customers explaining their needs and edit it down to a short sizzle reel. * Create a landing page, put in a field for explaining why leads are signing up, demonstrate to the tech guy that you're not just capturing random email addresses but passionate fans. * Use that same landing page to A/B test pitches, show data on how you can hone product/market fit via experimentation. * Get signed Letters of Intent from businesses detailing what their purchase commitments are willing to be if a set of well defined features were to be built. * Map out a series of go-to market strategies, research the pros and cons of each one, demonstrate you have some unique insights or resources that would give your startup an unfair advantage. * Build out an early front end prototype using non-technical tools. Have it hooked into a completely human powered backend (it's surprising how far you can get with just SMS for example, or email), run the entire system yourself to better understand the user's needs. Show how a small piece of technology could immediately super charge both the quality and scalability of the operation. * Go out and raise money contingent on finding a co-founder and search for co-founders contingent on raising money. Both groups are risk averse and like to see validation. Providing the mutual validation gets both to hop on board at the same time. * Learn programming in your spare time using free tools. Demonstrate to your tech cofounder that you're committed to understanding where they are coming from and respect the work they do. * Help everyone you can in your local community. Offer advice, intros, free work (but not too much) and be known as the connector and who everyone needs to know. Follow up with people on a regular interval and ask how they're going and see if there's anything they need help with that you're uniquely suited to do. At the same time, be cynically strategic about this. Like hangs out with like and you eventually get connected with higher ability tiers of people if you demonstrate the value you can bring. Find people slightly above your talent range and deliver the world to their plate. Skill up and repeat. * Just, in general, be a nice person and someone people want to work with. There's many different shades of nice and you also have to be someone authentic to your personality. Don't be afraid to be polarizing, I'm personally the "asshole nice" person in person and that turns quite a few people off but the ones who it clicks with, we click really well. In general, when I meet a non-business co-founder who's in the process of trying to get something started, I advise them not even to start looking for a technical co-founder yet. You can get so much done nowadays without touching technology and the class of people you're able to attract exponentially increases the further along you are. The people who get excited about hearing this message, I pay attention to more and try to help in any way. The people who balk at this, I can't see them ever getting far. edit: Another psychological factor that makes a huge difference is shifting from what I call a "scarcity" mindset to an "abundance" mindset because scarcity attracts scarcity and abundance attracts abundance. For example, it's immensely frustrating to me when I meet people who are job hunting and I ask them what they're after and they reply with some version of "Oh, I could really work anywhere". The reason they say that is because they think any job is better than no job and better to be overly broad so as to not miss out on any opportunities. In actuality, it's the opposite, telling me you could work anywhere means I can't find anything for you. Instead, where I can really add value is if you outline a set of broad theses about what you're excited about and I can suggest companies working towards those aims I know people at. During the course of that conversation, other areas of interest or other companies come up and by the end, there's usually 3 or 4 very strong intros I can send. The reason why these people are successful is because they are in an abundance mindset where they feel like they could work at a lot of places and are really more concerned about finding the right place for them and they're willing to be polarizing to do it. For job hunters, especially junior ones, I'm willing to go through the work of shifting them from a scarcity mindset to an abundance one and help them when networking with other people in the future. If you're at the co-founder stage though and you're still in the scarcity mindset, I have no sympathy for you and I'll just politely disengage. |