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This week I was inspired by our community fireside chat with Tibo, who recently sold his startup for $10 million, in how he described his process for early stage iteration. Join the community to watch the full recording.
Anyway, his talk made me realize something: Non-technical founders have it pretty rough.
Everyone from Y Combinator to Sequoia has said at one point or another that they prefer to invest in teams with at least one technical co-founder. At the very least, fundraising is more difficult without one.
And it’s a fact that there are more new non-technical founders on the market at any given time than technical ones.
But it turns out there’s actually a lot that non-technical founders can do to drive a startup forward before bringing a technical co-founder or founding engineer onto the team. My last startup reached our Series A before we brought on a full-time engineer.
Here’s 6 things non-technical founders should do instead of sitting on their hands 👇
Early Stage Tactics for Non-Technical Founders
Define Your Mission
You should find and define your “why” on your own regardless of whether you have a potential technical co-founder or not.
This is the step before you look for a specific problem to solve. Let yourself be temporarily consumed by self-exploration to uncover what’s driving you and what impact you want to have on the world.
Think about it, you could end up following the direction you start building in for 5 years, or the rest of your life. It’s worth a bit of time and consideration upfront.
For example, my mission is to grow the amount of startup founders in the world. It’s based in my belief that the best way individuals can quickly impact the world is by building a company.
It’s only after defining this that it makes sense for me to start thinking about what problem is stopping more people from becoming founders today.
Some questions you can ask yourself to help with this process
What’s something non-obvious you believed as a child that you still believe today?
What do you notice frequently that others don’t?
What bothers you about the state of the world?
What issues do you find your thoughts consistently drifting back to?
What keeps you up at night for no tangible reason?
Uncover the Problem
Once you have your mission, start doing user research. A LOT of it. Talk to as many people as possible who your mission will potentially impact if you’re successful in achieving it. Ask them about what they do, what frustrates them, and what they’d like to see change.
Counterintuitively, I wouldn’t recommend taking copious notes during these chats. Instead, be present in the moment and follow the conversations organically down whatever rabbit holes come up.
After each one ends, jot down the things that stand out and that you remember. I usually do this by texting myself just because it’s most natural, but use whatever tools you want.
Over time you’ll see natural patterns emerge. Patterns are the threads you want to keep pulling on in future conversations. Patterns are your opportunity.
When you find a pattern that isn’t only common, but also solvable and painful, define it in a problem statement. Here’s a useful video from Y Combinator about how to evaluate startup ideas at this stage:
Validate Solutions
Turns out there are quite a few ways to validate approaches to solve a problem without needing to code anything at all.
In fact, I’d recommend doing everything you can to validate before investing the time in building something out.
While you may get more detailed learnings that way you’ll get them more slowly, and speed matters more than completeness in the early stages. Lean on the 80/20 rule.
Instead:
For consumer → Test out various landing pages by running small budget Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns targeted at your chosen audience. Don’t spend more than $100 on this and use it to hone your value prop, product positioning, and messaging.
For B2B → Reach out to decision makers at your target companies and ask if they’d pay for your solution. Treat these interactions like part of your sales funnel, even though it doesn’t exist yet.
Regardless of which approach you take, accept payments. You can refund these right away if you like. The important thing is learning at what price your potential users will actually take their credit card out and pay.
This is also probably the farthest you can go in some verticals, like consumer social mobile apps, without an engineer.
Build a Waitlist or Make Initial Sales
Now that you have a solution to build, you need to decide: will you build a waitlist or start selling for real?
For service-based businesses, there’s no need for a waitlist until you run out of available capacity. But for product-based startups, both approaches can work. The question you should ask yourself is whether you’ll be able to service the sales. If not, build a waitlist.
In our fireside chat this week, Tibo talked about his experience getting to revenue generation as quickly as possible as his primary metric when evaluating which product to build. Watch the recording here.
Build a Scrappy MVP
Non-technical founders can also build scrappy MVPs. There are two paths to do this, and the right choice will depend on the product or service your startup offers.
No-code tools
Relying on no-code tools for too long can result in a brittle, buggy business that you’re constantly debugging issues for. This is what inevitably happens when you have a bunch of disparate systems sending data back and forth.
But no-code tools are easy to learn and can set up many MVP versions of core processes for a variety of businesses.
Spend a weekend teaching yourself:
Zapier
Airtable
Typeform
Carrd
With those alone you’ll be able to build something from scratch in a day. Don’t believe me? Samuel Thompson live-tweeted himself building a business in 24 hours with no-code tools.
Virtual Assistants
You may be able to get away without even building a no-code MVP. By hiring a VA (or a team of VAs) you can scale up your operations dramatically at an affordable cost.
VAs can take care of a variety of tasks but most common help with data entry, repeatable processes (use Looms to show how they’re done), and general operations.
My favorite places to hire from are:
Onlinejobs.ph → You need to vet the candidates yourself (and there are a lot to sort through) but no long-term contracts.
Shepherd → They offer a done-for-you hiring process, but charge a one-time headhunter fee and ask you to sign a contract (though they do replace candidates if they don’t work out in the first 30 days).
Keep Going
If you’ve done all of the above and revenue is growing steadily each week, well, maybe you never needed a technical co-founder after all either. Your first technical hire may end up being a Founding Engineer rather than a co-founder.
Whether the next step for you is raising money or just continuing to grow the business, nothing’s stopping you.
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