Ask HN: What does a non-programmer bring to a 2-3 person startup team?

I attended a startup event recently, a weekend long event the type where you are supposed to meet people and/or find partners to work on your idea. My first time at such an event and I had high hopes but was thoroughly disappointed. About 80% of the people there call themselves business, sales, marketing or product managers. Leaving aside the fact that most of the ideas are about creating groupon clones or iphone apps for which about 20 variants already exist, I was surprised to see so many non-programmers (about 80% of the crowd) at these events. This is an honest question, why do I need a guy that does not write code on a 2-3 person team? If you are an entrepreneur worth your salt you should do everything.

Also how do you meet programming partners. I have been working by myself for a while but it will greatly help to have someone else to work with. What are some credible events that I can attend?

I don't understand why all those product and marketing people don't form programmerless teams and cheaply outsource their initial programming needs.

This won't work for immensely complex ideas, and it won't produce award-winning code, but it'll be good enough to create a minimum viable product and see if it has traction.

If it does get any traction, THEN they can worry about finding a programming partner, and the question of what they bring to the team will be clear -- a business that has already shown traction.

   Also how do you meet programming partners.

It's been my experience that trying to find a good person to work with is like dating. If you're actively trying to find someone, you seem to have less luck than if you're not trying to find someone and you often settle for something less than great.

My advice is to go find find some open source projects that tackle a problem you find interesting and contribute. In the process of working on open source projects, you'll find people that you can work with well. They might be useful in the future.

There's all sorts of problems with this. Usually startups don't have enough money to hire good developers, so they try to pay people in equity. Most developers who aren't personally invested in the idea or the founding team aren't going to split equity with non-technical people unless everyone is clearly bringing something to the table (marketing, fundraising, etc).

Unless there's a clearly even split of labor in the early days of a startup, the technical members of a hybrid team are taking the majority of the risk. To get the company on its feet, they'll need to sink a correspondingly large amount of time into developing the product versus their non-technical cofounders.

Software is very expensive to build. Let's say that to take an MVP from zero to market will take only one man-month of effort (160 hours) -- which, when you consider billing systems, etc. is likely a low estimate. If you paid a good consultant $100/hour to build it for you, that's about $16,000. Many startups don't have this kind of cash sitting around.

So let's say you outsource the development to offshore developers to save some money. Let's say you start to get some traction, and you want to bring on a technical co-founder. It's going to be a really hard sell to get a developer to join your project after your product is already poorly-written. Developers hate maintenance. If a group of non-technical people approached me with a post-launch MVP, I'd assume their code was bad and run for the hills. (At a minimum I would ask to see it before agreeing to anything, which would likely just solidify my viewpoint.) If you're willing to throw out the MVP code and have the new cofounder rewrite it, that might be something you could convince a developer to join up for -- but be prepared to "lose" the money for the initial MVP development.

It's not enough to bring a "business that already has traction" to the group. Maybe if you were selling me the MVP, that might be interesting, but if you were looking for a partnership, I'd want to know what you'd spend your time doing.

We have a three person startup with one programmer, one design and marketing person, and one "other." The "other" person on the team had the original idea, pays the dev bills, and is our primary non-technical tester.

We value all three partners equally - literally and figuratively. Sure, we could outsource the code, or outsource the design, or decide no idea has value if you can't build it yourself, but that is just not how we are constituted as people. We're very comfortable with our configuration.