Ask HN: Starting a SaaS business as non-technical founder

With tech it's similar. You could supervise the end result but there are so many decisions taken "in the kitchen" that will have an impact in the product. Maybe 6 months from now you will want to implement a feature and because the developer decided to use XYZ it's not feasible to do it and you have to rewrite that from scratch.

I'm not saying all founders should be technical, but at least one should be. It's a software company after all.

Otherwise you should outsource the absolute minimum necessary to prove the idea has legs in the market and use that to attract a technical cofounder.

As a bonus, using these no code tools forces you to learn how to architect an application at a high-level, which can be useful if you choose to learn how to code “for real” someday.

This is a difficult situation as positive founders that you can build a company with are hard to come by (been there) and outsourcing is a minefield. I would suggest not to engage with an offshore outsourcing company, I have had terrible experiences here (they may tell u they are under NDA so cannot share any of their ‘successful’ projects, of which there are probably none), and if they know you don’t know tech, it’s a free for all. The other issue is they will try to bleed you up front and most startups are based on iteration, but you will probably have no cash left to incorporate the feedback into another version. Also, the quality will be terrible and they will not care about your project. What could Work, to get you started, is to find a single engineer you can work with (and pay) to get an MVP up and running, this could be a young guy or an off shore engineer but someone who will to work with you. This can keep your costs reasonable. The only issue here is that you have to think about how to move that MVP into a real product so you are really kicking the can down the road, but this can get you started.

In summary, avoid out sourcing like the corona virus.

If there's any pattern I can see with the non-technical founders, it's that some knowledge of coding is certainly nice, if only so the founders can talk to the actual coders. But coding's not the most important thing. The two most important things for a non-technical founder are (1) understanding their market, and (2) closing deals.

Steve Blank (a respected startup expert) proposed a way to prove that you can do (1) and (2): Collect non-binding letters of intent from future customers. These letters should say something like "If you can produce software that does X, Y and Z acceptably well, we would would like to negotiate a contract with you for $1000/month." (See Blank's classic "Four Steps to the Epiphany" for more details.)

If you can collect 10 of those letters, then you should have no problem finding a technical co-founder, and you'll be bringing strong assets to the table.

(The details might be different for your startup. Maybe your product is only worth $200/month, or whatever. But the key point is that you can go talk to customers and close deals.)