You’ve got that perfect idea for a startup — the one that you know is going to revolutionize the way everyone spends the time they currently spend on FarmVille.
It’s nothing like anything that’s come before, and that’s something of a problem. Unless you are one of the best programmers the world has ever seen, a revolutionary startup may come with some serious technical challenges.
And if you aren’t even a programmer, handling the technology at your startup can be a serious challenge.
So how do you get from an amazing idea to a world-changing startup?
The Magic of a Technical Cofounder
Even if you’ve got some mad programming chops yourself, your best bet is to look for a technical cofounder — someone who can take on a big share of the development work, without needing to be a fully salaried employee right off the bat.
It’s tempting to try to avoid cofounders. Some of us have a little voice in our heads that tell us a project needs to be ours alone and that we’re better off just bringing in help as needed. But there’s more ego in that line of thought than entrepreneurship. The right person can take your business to a higher level, but only if you can make sure she’s invested in what you’re doing.
A contract coder is only invested to the point he gets paid. You may not always agree with a cofounder, but you’ll know that she’s in it for the long haul.
You can find someone to work with who will challenge you to find new solutions and to build the best company you can. Finding the right cofounder is as much a matter of finding someone who motivates you as a question of bringing on a new skill set. Together, you should be more than the sum of your parts.
Finding that Perfect Cofounder
There are several matchmaking sites out there that allow people interested in creating a startup to advertise what sort of cofounder they’re looking for. This seems like a pretty bad idea: while a stranger isn’t necessarily the wrong person to work with on a startup, you do want to at least know a little about his skills.
Working on a few small projects that can let you get a feel for how someone works and if you make a good pair is an ideal way to start. The open source community can be an amazing place to build the sort of connections you need to found a startup and, even better, you can get a very objective look at the quality of the work done by any prospective partners you’re interested in.
Just counting the number of commits a coder has under her belt can give you a lot of insight into whether you want to work with that person.
Once you’ve got the right partner, actually executing the idea you have in mind becomes a whole lot easier.
Sharing Your Ideas the Right Way
You don’t need to slap an NDA down in front of someone before you start telling them about your idea. There’s a certain sense that you have to protect your ideas, but the truth is that there is ultimately no way to do that. If you trust a person enough to ask them to partner with you, skip the NDA.
Your first sit down should be casual: it’s as much a brainstorming session as an opportunity for you to share what you’ve been thinking about.
Any cofounder you bring in is going to need an opportunity to put his stamp on your idea, no matter how much you’ve already done. That can be difficult to handle — we tend to start to think about our ideas as our babies.
But don’t get too protective. If you chose a partner whose abilities you respect, the insight she may offer could be exactly what’s needed to take a concept to the next level (or to turn it into something that is actually feasible to build).
At the end of the day, execution is just as much a question of who you choose to work with as picking up the technical skills necessary for a particular idea.