One regular people more business oriented that look to build a startup find difficult is to find a technical co-founder.

In order for a startup to have higher chances of success, it’s often recommended that the founding team have people of complementary skills: somebody who can sell and somebody who can build.

But building a product from scratch requires technical expertise that is somewhat hard to find. It requires some skills for building something that looks nice, that covers the business logic fine, to handle the data using databases and have it serve users all over the world on the internet. Usually “normal” developers are specialized only in one of these areas, and don’t have first hand expertise with the others. Only a handful do, the “full stacks”.

So from the start, the people who can build a product and put it in the hands of the customers are pretty rare. The bad news is that they are also employed and earning a pretty good salary and have cushy jobs, with less stress than building a startup from scratch.

So, you either have the funding to get them into your company and build, but then there is a higher than zero chance that they won’t be fully invested in your idea and will just work with you on the side, as long as it’s easy and convenient.

And that’s if you manage to convince themselves to work with you. But a lot of non-technical founders find that it’s very hard to convince a technical co-founder to jump in.

How do you do it though?

Don’t be an idea person

Technical people, due to the fact that they possess a valuable set of skills, they get bombarded with a lot of “idea people”. They are the ones that think that if they come with an idea is enough to all themselves a co-founder and retain 90% of the company, while having somebody else build the product for 10%.

Don’t be like that.

Ideas are worthless and by themselves don’t have any value. Once they are implemented and a product begins to materialize from that idea, then some value is created. But the value is in the implementation, not the idea.

You’ll have to bring much more to the table to have a 50-50 partnership. Don’t even think to low-ball your technical co-founder with a 10% stake or something, if they do all the work and you are going by the “build it and they will come” mantra, meaning you wait for the product to get build and then hope for the best.

Bring value to the table

The most valuable asset I think founders and employees can bring into a startup is industry insider knowledge. This means they are familiar with how things are getting done in the industry they are building their product for, they know firsthand the problem, and most importantly, they know people in that industry that can open doors for dialogue, feedback and possible contracts.

Then, if you need to put the effort first and have some kind of validation already done: either signed letters of intent from clients, or even actual legal binding contracts. Or experiments/numbers that assert the demand for the product you plan to build, or an email list of leads and some positive conversations that already took place.

And of course, to put your money where your mouth is: this can either come in the shape of funds, meaning that you already put some of your money in the startup (either to cover the costs for the validation process or for building an MVP) or being all in with your idea (already quit your job to be full time in your startup and combined with the fact that you are not filthy rich, means that your livelihood is dependent on the success of this startup).

Bring somebody in for their expertise

One thing that turns off any developer when it comes to joining a startup, is any kind of technical input from the non-technical people founders. Things like “you should use AI” or “you should use this programming language, I heard it’s good”, or “we should use Amazon over Google because I saw a presentation a whole ago and they said it’s what everybody does”.

In other words, you are bringing somebody with technical expertise onboard, so you have to give them the autonomy to deliver and make the technical choices. But here is a caveat: you need to make sure, as part of the vetting process that they are joining your startup because they believe in your idea and want to build the product, and not because they want to try out some shiny toys, and need a reason to use them.

Conclusion

If you do these and prove that you are all in with your idea, it’s more likely to be able to convince a technical person to jump in if you cover the other necessary parts of building a startup.

If you don’t, and you only bring an idea to the table, then there is nothing much to build on, mainly because the idea isn’t going to sell itself. And neither is the product. It has to be actively sold and iterated on based on the feedback from the clients, in dialogues you need to have as part of the validation process.

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