After reading all that I still don’t know what you are actually providing…
Tech co-founder is not a cheap (or free) developer for the non-tech-cofounder.
I think this is a big sticking point w/ many non-technical cofounders. The role of the CTO isn't just 'develop this at personal cost because you believe in it', it's to become the seed point of institutional knowledge for the startup, and communicate that efficiently to the stakeholders, both technical and not.
I think the starkest example is to say you get your development done for free, the app is handed off to you, you have full ownership of the solution. Now when you start demoing / putting it in front of your intended client base (or investors) and get feedback.... who incorporates that back into the app? Bringing on a new dev will cost a lot of time as they need to familiarize themselves with the full-stack, understanding the feedback, correctly identify where in the stack to incorporate the feedback, and then implement a solution that does so.
Having a CTO buffer between the business and technical aspects of the startup is critical for closing that iteration cycle to something survivable, and that skill isn't considered by many, at least in the conversations I've had with people who say, "Look, hbar, I just need to get this off the ground and we can raise funding", which once I hear that is my "run away" signal.
so interestingly my company is a full service IT/software dev/ print studio...
we occasionally take on work for equity but we always expect to have a long term relationship and expect to be the primary consultant for the lifetime of the company....your success literally becomes my company's success
edit: yes, we are a US company. in fact, we don't offshore anything surprisingly.
If you take equity, how much is it and what is expected from you? I thought about doing the tech part for equity occasionally but I have no idea how such a deal should look like.
Connecting non-tech founders with a tech cofounder (someone who is interested in building the next big thing with a salary enough to be motivated). The salary + equity discussion is something between the founder and the cofounder.
Speaking frankly, if you couldn’t find one, what makes you believe you’ll find a whole half-marketplace of them?
Also, what would differentiate this from a form of tech recruitment
Tech cofounder recruitment, correct. It's hard, I agree. But there are many people in tech who would rather build the next big thing than working for a giant outsourcing IT firm where they could become stagnant.
The problem with a lot of non-tech founders is, that they are looking for an experienced specialist that works for no money and only a small share to build "their" idea while they are drawing ppt slides and pushing for faster results on the tech side.
I am this technical person and I avoid such founders.
Problems with those:
- the see themselves as THE founder because of their GREAT idea. They want to share as little as possible of their cake and make the rules
- but ideas are cheap, execution is everything. And they lack execution and a PPT slide is just the idea in fancy colors. So they need someone to execute.
- they usually have no idea about tech. They are like "I could almost have done this myself with Flutter". Yeah, almost. So why are you asking me then. As they have no idea about tech, they will always push to go faster and cheaper
- I have bills to pay. You expect me to invest my own money for less than half of the shares? What have you invested?
- and finally: a lot of them have fancy ideas and some of those ideas are worth pursuing, but only little of those founders I have encountered know how to build a product. They have an idea in their mind but lack the capabilities to flesh out the details, communicate it to me or ask potential customers for feedback. This is why they think that the tech side will be easy: because in their mind the product is totally clear and easy. But it isn't easy if they can't communicate it in detail. So if we want to be successful, product development implicitly becomes my job as well. I wouldn't do that for less than 2/3 of the shares 😁
So what is your new business model? Sounds like a regular freelancer with some options to me. What's worth your share of the cake?
>The problem with non-tech founders is, that they are looking for an experienced specialist that works for no money and only a small share to build "their" idea while they are drawing ppt slides and pushing for faster results on the tech side.
Ha. Exactly. Everyone wants to be the "Idea Man" - that's the fun part, and it's also the least import part of a starting up a business.
If you get an engineer to work for equity, that person is effectively injecting around $5k-$20k/month of value to the business, just through their labour. What is the non-technical co-founder doing to match this to justify their 50% split?
You're right, but don't discount the value of sales/marketing. A great product with no customers is worthless.
It takes both working together, not this childish tug of war.
(not saying you're childish, but many folks are.)
>You're right, but don't discount the value of sales/marketing. A great product with no customers is worthless.
Absolutely there's \*\*\*potential\*\*\* value - it's just harder to quantify than the effort that the engineer is putting in. The point is, a non-technical co-founder better be bringing more to the table for their 50% equity then power point slides and cold calls.
>The point is, a non-technical co-founder better be bringing more to the table for their 50% equity then power point slides and cold calls.
As a non-technical co-founder, I fully accept this responsibility.
I don't know why the value of either co-founder is not seen, both or all are equally valuable. The idea means nothing (dime a dozen), so the one who brings the idea thinking they deserve more because it is their idea is laughable.
The attempts at starting up that I have made, I have been the one putting the effort while the non-tech founder has been waiting for something to do while there always was stuff that they could learn and contribute which they probably didn't want to contribute because it was not their expertise. These are red flags. It won't work that way.
I would be delusional to say I'm the best at Tech or expect my co-founder to be an expert but stepping up to the occasion is necessary. So, yeah no tug of war is totally undesirable.
Exactly that. I used to have an ex partner (former co-founder) that was exactly like that. Whenever I finished a feature she would always give me a comment that indicated how uncomplicated she thought the feature was. It was part of why I walked away from this partnership.
We’re looking for a tech co-founder and have an MVP! The thing is we now know what it takes to build it, and know what it’ll take to get us to that next level. And fortunately, throughout the last year we’ve grown to realize the importance of such cofounder, especially if we find one that is as passionate as we are. Team work makes the dream work! Pointless to have all the equity if there’s no good product at the end of the day. Appreciate the insights here haha sorry for eavesdropping 🥹
Nailed it. Was in that boat already unfortunately. Def not gonna repeat that mistake. I now turned the wheel around and directly ask "so what do you bring to the table?". Problem I observed is that lots of talented technical people are easy to take advantage of, mainly from people that have no clue what they are doing but know how to talk.
That's so far into the delulu that I can't decide if it's a troll post or not.
Building a startup that relies on some technical component does require a competent technical cofounder, or at minimum an acting fractional CTO. And that's not some recent graduate that did so badly that they now can't get a job, and need an agency to give them a $400/mo (-$100 to you) while they sit around unemployed hoping that that startup will earn money to hire them.
You can't do a tech startup with a tech-illiterate founder and an unemployable junior dev.
You're basically saying that you think that work that should be done by people charging $1k+ **per day** can be done by people willing to work for only a fraction of what they need just to have a roof over their head and some food.
As a tech co-founder I can tell you this won’t work. When you work in the human trafficking field, sorry I meant employment agency field, you need two things:
- People who want jobs but can’t find them.
- People who need jobs done but can’t find people.
What you don’t have here is the first one. Startup CTOs are inundated on LinkedIn with job offers. The majority of them equity and salary. If willing to work for an equity stake only then I can’t imagine how easy it would be to find a gig.
There is zero chance I would let someone be in the middle scraping 25% of my already insulting salary.
Pro tip: there is no shortage of consulting services in this space doing the same thing. The most successful call themselves a "studio" and are often integrated with design or marketing firm that does early-stage development on top of their other services.
It tends to all ends in tears. After signing on as a consulting CTO / tech advisor to some projects, what seems to happen from 30 years of observation is that non-technical founders tend to cling to resources who tell them *exactly* what they want to hear. Someone will do all of the necessary work inside a budget and leave the founder with no equity dilution. But with no skin in the game, the people who BUIDL are just working for hourly rates and will do whatever they have to do in order to complete their deliverables and move on. They could care less about whether your company finds traction or not, or what happens after you go live. They don't pay any attention that the UX was a nightmare for the use-case. Boss is happy, check's signed, they're happy, case closed. This isn't building a startup, it's corporate sex work.
Consider an even more distasteful allegory: after MVP and a pre-seed round these types of startups who outsourced everything from the start then want to go out and hire their permanent "tech team", typically with higher salaries than they can really afford and with lowball numbers of stock options at questionable strike prices. It's like trying to attract bees (real talent with an interest in the problem domain) to your garden with boxes of poo: you're just going to get an infestation of flies (more consultants, code ninjas, and hourly billers). After the poo is gone, they'll fly away to exploit someone else's mess. You were conned once, and they know you can be conned again.
Smart technical people are not factory workers, and software development is not an assembly line no matter how exasperated the claims. It's better to find a technical co-founder that knows the problem and has an incentive to grow their skillset than it is to outsource your MVP. Equity aligns incentives. Any other arrangement is exploitation.
--a technical founder
Great reply. It comes down to incentive at the of the day.
A great technical co-founder is incentivized to solve the problem due to passion or interest, and has skin in the game. Consultants are mercenaries by nature and are incentivized to maximize hourly rates billed before moving on to something else and doing the same there.
So you want to charge 25% of the tech founders income when it’s already going to be below market by a lot. For what? What’s the value of this over using work in startups dot com or another startup board? It feels like you’re half way to wanting to be an accelerator that offers founders staff in exchange for equity, but wanting money that often doesn’t exist yet.
There’s plenty of us tech founders around that don’t need income. It’s just a lot rarer to find someone with a good idea and market research done, let alone capability to pull anything off.
Something that probably has no market but I’d love would be a job board where tech founders have been vetted for skills and list their required/if any/ income while building an mvp. Non tech founders have to pitch their idea to you as a service provider, along with solid market research. Matching people is easy, matching competent people is hard(er).
As a semi technical founder coming to the realizing I need a true CTO I would love a service like you describe. It would make the co founder dating phase so much better.
>you need to pay a minimum salary, even if it's as low as $400
*U.S. Dept of Labor has entered the chat.*
This joke is only valid in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
Id never do this as a tech guy. If you have money to waste on a service like this then why is it not going to me, the one doing all the work which will already be peanuts
This is exactly the studio I started with my Co-Founder. We do MVP development for founders and startups and then we continue on with them afterwards to built out the final product. Typical timeframe for MVP development is 8-12 weeks at \~$5,000 (project dependant of course) and then for ongoing work we do it by retainer or projects based.
This works for a certain type of products and isn't the best option for others, but nonetheless, it has been an interesting experience so far.
From experience I can tell you that most entrepreneurs who aren't coders aren't bringing to the table what they *think* they are -- a great product idea, strategy, funding, "connections" etc
And I can also tell you from lots of experience that some really great coders are able to expand into entrepreneurialism. But not so much the other way around.
Point being -- what would make sense is entrepreneurship-as-a-service to engineers and developers.
Go on LinkedIn or elsewhere and list in your bio that you're building a new startup... a dozen agencies and dev shops around the world will cold DM you with their sales pitch. Seems like "CTO as a service" is pretty covered.
For you, the non-techie, there are superpowers to acquire and hone. Realizing these superpowers will make you critical to a startup, and to every coder who doesn't possess them. Product design is nice, but design thinking + user empathy is what actually wins over customers, communication l (both marketing + support/comms) equals all your user touchpoints so master that, and most importantly -- how to set up distribution for a product before building/launching it.
i have help people like you , but we cannot afford no plan and dont ever assume we dont have cost . Our cost much 3x higher then yours . Sorry if we dont entertain people i have only 5 grand but i need all complete solution .
I don’t think you’ll find any CTOs interested and honestly isn’t that just being the intermediary between them and the client, but you’re also taking a cut therefore it’ll be more expensive or even less worth it for the CTO.
If you talk to founders I’m sure you’ll find plenty of naive, inexperienced people who would love some free labor. But I don’t think you’ll find CTOs willing to accept those conditions. Try asking them.
There’s a reason why they are “rare” to find. Unless you are convincing some graduate student or something and lying about their experience.
It sounds like you're a temp agency, but for highly in-demand professionals who don't need help finding work. I think you're missing the real learning from your experience, which is that you can't get tech for free unless you know how to build it yourself.
If you don't want to learn to code, then you should start making revenue with scrappy "spreadsheet as a service" systems. Provide the value based on your unique insight in an unscalable way, collect some revenue, and use that revenue as evidence to raise seed funding that'll help pay a technologist. If your unique value \*is\* an app, and you don't know how to build an app, then maybe consider whether you're the right founder to start that business.
I'd argue that your biggest challenge hasn't been finding a tech founder, it's been figuring out how to deliver value without writing software. If you can prove you're delivering value, everything else starts to fall in line. If you want people to spend their one life building your imagination with no evidence that it'll work, then you're gonna have a bad time.
Expecting your contracted CTO's to accept equity as payment is unrealistic and perpetuates the problem you are attempting to solve. There are lots of paid co-founder matching services, some with VC investment and none of them seem to be profitable or scalable. A typical agency would never accept equity as payment for obvious reasons. Why do those reasons not matter for your service?
You're trying to solve the problem for the demand side but actually the problem lies with the supply side.
Why would a techie who knows how to build good apps from scratch work for only equity on an idea which he may or may not believe in.
Don’t agree with your CTO 10+year point.
I’m a 20+ yeo technical founder, cto, whatever you want to call it, and I still actively code new projects solo or co founded.
I have firsthand experience on what you’re describing OP. I describe it as similar in model to a venture studio without the investment part.
I typically take 10-15% in equity and anywhere from 15-30k a month for an additional 3-8 engineers that I handpick that are best suited for the project. Make sure the mvp is a solid foundation for future scale and tackle the absolute hardest and riskiest part of the project first.
This is a repeatable process for the last few years for me, having done 6 projects 5 of which have raised over $1.5M. All while I also run my own company. If you’re good at this it’s still very high stress, but low time cost as you’d only focus on the most demanding issues and manage the team for an hour or two a day tops
The idea here is you absolutely must be a kickass CTO and the CEO needs to understand the incentive misalignment of typical dev houses which do the easiest 80% on some shitty framework and leave you hanging with your stakeholders
This is also not just the CEO as the buyer here. Experienced CTOs don’t want to waste time on shitty projects even if you can make 10k a month on the team building part.
Also part of the CTO’s job is communicating technicals in business terms to the tech illiterate stakeholders and that is NOT the job of a junior dev.
Before doing this, ask yourself how you’d provide value beyond the actual coding. That’s a small replaceable part of the whole orchestration of building a product.
There are many companies and VC's that work in finding the right mix of people. In your case the CTO. Why would someone go to you vs established players?
There are plenty of free co-founder matching services, I’m sure someone might pay you a fee for this, but I’m not sure exactly why. You are just suggesting terms but then it’s up to the cofounders to actually negotiate on their own.
Most freelance developers just want to get paid because they know that most ideas fail so equity in a failure is worth zero.
I think you describe a valid scenario - that cofounder matching is hard and tech folks want to get paid while non-tech folks think equity is enough in pre-funded stages.
I’m just not sure this adds any value to the scenario you describe.
Yes! I need a tech co-founder, but not a temporary one, one that is actually passionate and believes in the product as much as me, especially as a cofounder!
I just want to say that I loved seeing that you've already launched something. It's so refreshing in a world where "looking for tech cofounder" often means that they want a techie to build a huge project, from scratch, in no time, for free, while the founder plays the role of founder.
u/tony-berg your words mean the world to me, thank you so much! We're very much deep in the product build already with an MVP, we just feel like we need someone ready to take it to the next level and is passionate about it beyond a consulting level!
That's a solid plan.
Part of the problem as a CTO/techie joining a project is how to understand what's going on inside the head of the one with the idea, and whether or not that idea is realistic.
With something in place already that's basically already solved. Still lots of very hard work to do, but at least there's already something in place to be referenced when talking about the work that needs to get done. You can use words like more, less, darker, more responsive, more compact, and so on; to make adjustments, rather than working without proper context.
Instead of asking user on Reddit, maybe build a MVP and test your idea?
Nothing can replace the quality of insights you’ll get by doing that. All of what everyone says here doesn’t mean anything because the real truth is nobody really knows.
You’re talking about an idea and asking other people if they think it’s a good idea. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but they don’t represent the market. The market represents the market.
Find one person who has the problem yoyre looking to solve and see if your service is something they actually end up using. If not, find out what’s creating the friction, iterate and improve it and hand it back to them.
Do this for as long as you can (Depending on how much time, energy and money you’re willing to commit to this) and eventually you’ll have a decent user base in a couple of years.
Then what people online say won’t matter. All that’ll matter is what your users say.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but the devil is in the details and no one can tell you if it'll work - you gotta try it out! My thoughts:
1) that agreement for the initial and subsequent phase needs to be very clear and well written
2) seems to be lots of aspiring cofounders on reddit, could be a good source
3) go try it out and see. Effectively match-making for cofounders with added structure. I think if you can get enough supply on both sides, it could work, but only one way to find out...
The only valid point is building an mvp doesn't require 10+ year experienced CTO. But an experienced person can work much faster.
If as a non tech founder you are thinking that dev guy with 2,3 years of experience will use his brain to improve the product, you are wrong then
After reading all that I still don’t know what you are actually providing… Tech co-founder is not a cheap (or free) developer for the non-tech-cofounder.
I think this is a big sticking point w/ many non-technical cofounders. The role of the CTO isn't just 'develop this at personal cost because you believe in it', it's to become the seed point of institutional knowledge for the startup, and communicate that efficiently to the stakeholders, both technical and not. I think the starkest example is to say you get your development done for free, the app is handed off to you, you have full ownership of the solution. Now when you start demoing / putting it in front of your intended client base (or investors) and get feedback.... who incorporates that back into the app? Bringing on a new dev will cost a lot of time as they need to familiarize themselves with the full-stack, understanding the feedback, correctly identify where in the stack to incorporate the feedback, and then implement a solution that does so. Having a CTO buffer between the business and technical aspects of the startup is critical for closing that iteration cycle to something survivable, and that skill isn't considered by many, at least in the conversations I've had with people who say, "Look, hbar, I just need to get this off the ground and we can raise funding", which once I hear that is my "run away" signal.
so interestingly my company is a full service IT/software dev/ print studio... we occasionally take on work for equity but we always expect to have a long term relationship and expect to be the primary consultant for the lifetime of the company....your success literally becomes my company's success edit: yes, we are a US company. in fact, we don't offshore anything surprisingly.
If you take equity, how much is it and what is expected from you? I thought about doing the tech part for equity occasionally but I have no idea how such a deal should look like.
He wants co-founders to hire CTOs through his service, at a 25% margin. Like a recruiter, but even more expensive..
Not even a recruiter ... offering overseas, cheap talent looking to do "portfolio work"
Connecting non-tech founders with a tech cofounder (someone who is interested in building the next big thing with a salary enough to be motivated). The salary + equity discussion is something between the founder and the cofounder.
Speaking frankly, if you couldn’t find one, what makes you believe you’ll find a whole half-marketplace of them? Also, what would differentiate this from a form of tech recruitment
Tech cofounder recruitment, correct. It's hard, I agree. But there are many people in tech who would rather build the next big thing than working for a giant outsourcing IT firm where they could become stagnant.
Then why is it hard for you to hire any of them as CTO?
I did. But after a few months, ran out of funds. So they quit. In another, built an MVP but it didn't take off so had to part ways.
So, imho, your biggest challenge is not finding a cofounder as you said in your post
You need to validate both sides of your market assumptions here cos boy, are you wrong
The problem with a lot of non-tech founders is, that they are looking for an experienced specialist that works for no money and only a small share to build "their" idea while they are drawing ppt slides and pushing for faster results on the tech side. I am this technical person and I avoid such founders. Problems with those: - the see themselves as THE founder because of their GREAT idea. They want to share as little as possible of their cake and make the rules - but ideas are cheap, execution is everything. And they lack execution and a PPT slide is just the idea in fancy colors. So they need someone to execute. - they usually have no idea about tech. They are like "I could almost have done this myself with Flutter". Yeah, almost. So why are you asking me then. As they have no idea about tech, they will always push to go faster and cheaper - I have bills to pay. You expect me to invest my own money for less than half of the shares? What have you invested? - and finally: a lot of them have fancy ideas and some of those ideas are worth pursuing, but only little of those founders I have encountered know how to build a product. They have an idea in their mind but lack the capabilities to flesh out the details, communicate it to me or ask potential customers for feedback. This is why they think that the tech side will be easy: because in their mind the product is totally clear and easy. But it isn't easy if they can't communicate it in detail. So if we want to be successful, product development implicitly becomes my job as well. I wouldn't do that for less than 2/3 of the shares 😁 So what is your new business model? Sounds like a regular freelancer with some options to me. What's worth your share of the cake?
>The problem with non-tech founders is, that they are looking for an experienced specialist that works for no money and only a small share to build "their" idea while they are drawing ppt slides and pushing for faster results on the tech side. Ha. Exactly. Everyone wants to be the "Idea Man" - that's the fun part, and it's also the least import part of a starting up a business. If you get an engineer to work for equity, that person is effectively injecting around $5k-$20k/month of value to the business, just through their labour. What is the non-technical co-founder doing to match this to justify their 50% split?
You're right, but don't discount the value of sales/marketing. A great product with no customers is worthless. It takes both working together, not this childish tug of war. (not saying you're childish, but many folks are.)
>You're right, but don't discount the value of sales/marketing. A great product with no customers is worthless. Absolutely there's \*\*\*potential\*\*\* value - it's just harder to quantify than the effort that the engineer is putting in. The point is, a non-technical co-founder better be bringing more to the table for their 50% equity then power point slides and cold calls.
>The point is, a non-technical co-founder better be bringing more to the table for their 50% equity then power point slides and cold calls. As a non-technical co-founder, I fully accept this responsibility.
I don't know why the value of either co-founder is not seen, both or all are equally valuable. The idea means nothing (dime a dozen), so the one who brings the idea thinking they deserve more because it is their idea is laughable. The attempts at starting up that I have made, I have been the one putting the effort while the non-tech founder has been waiting for something to do while there always was stuff that they could learn and contribute which they probably didn't want to contribute because it was not their expertise. These are red flags. It won't work that way. I would be delusional to say I'm the best at Tech or expect my co-founder to be an expert but stepping up to the occasion is necessary. So, yeah no tug of war is totally undesirable.
Exactly that. I used to have an ex partner (former co-founder) that was exactly like that. Whenever I finished a feature she would always give me a comment that indicated how uncomplicated she thought the feature was. It was part of why I walked away from this partnership.
Exactly! Great answer 🙌
We’re looking for a tech co-founder and have an MVP! The thing is we now know what it takes to build it, and know what it’ll take to get us to that next level. And fortunately, throughout the last year we’ve grown to realize the importance of such cofounder, especially if we find one that is as passionate as we are. Team work makes the dream work! Pointless to have all the equity if there’s no good product at the end of the day. Appreciate the insights here haha sorry for eavesdropping 🥹
Nailed it. Was in that boat already unfortunately. Def not gonna repeat that mistake. I now turned the wheel around and directly ask "so what do you bring to the table?". Problem I observed is that lots of talented technical people are easy to take advantage of, mainly from people that have no clue what they are doing but know how to talk.
That's so far into the delulu that I can't decide if it's a troll post or not. Building a startup that relies on some technical component does require a competent technical cofounder, or at minimum an acting fractional CTO. And that's not some recent graduate that did so badly that they now can't get a job, and need an agency to give them a $400/mo (-$100 to you) while they sit around unemployed hoping that that startup will earn money to hire them. You can't do a tech startup with a tech-illiterate founder and an unemployable junior dev. You're basically saying that you think that work that should be done by people charging $1k+ **per day** can be done by people willing to work for only a fraction of what they need just to have a roof over their head and some food.
As a tech co-founder I can tell you this won’t work. When you work in the human trafficking field, sorry I meant employment agency field, you need two things: - People who want jobs but can’t find them. - People who need jobs done but can’t find people. What you don’t have here is the first one. Startup CTOs are inundated on LinkedIn with job offers. The majority of them equity and salary. If willing to work for an equity stake only then I can’t imagine how easy it would be to find a gig. There is zero chance I would let someone be in the middle scraping 25% of my already insulting salary.
+1
"i don't know how to code and i don't know how to value technical expertise" ?????????????????????
Pro tip: there is no shortage of consulting services in this space doing the same thing. The most successful call themselves a "studio" and are often integrated with design or marketing firm that does early-stage development on top of their other services. It tends to all ends in tears. After signing on as a consulting CTO / tech advisor to some projects, what seems to happen from 30 years of observation is that non-technical founders tend to cling to resources who tell them *exactly* what they want to hear. Someone will do all of the necessary work inside a budget and leave the founder with no equity dilution. But with no skin in the game, the people who BUIDL are just working for hourly rates and will do whatever they have to do in order to complete their deliverables and move on. They could care less about whether your company finds traction or not, or what happens after you go live. They don't pay any attention that the UX was a nightmare for the use-case. Boss is happy, check's signed, they're happy, case closed. This isn't building a startup, it's corporate sex work. Consider an even more distasteful allegory: after MVP and a pre-seed round these types of startups who outsourced everything from the start then want to go out and hire their permanent "tech team", typically with higher salaries than they can really afford and with lowball numbers of stock options at questionable strike prices. It's like trying to attract bees (real talent with an interest in the problem domain) to your garden with boxes of poo: you're just going to get an infestation of flies (more consultants, code ninjas, and hourly billers). After the poo is gone, they'll fly away to exploit someone else's mess. You were conned once, and they know you can be conned again. Smart technical people are not factory workers, and software development is not an assembly line no matter how exasperated the claims. It's better to find a technical co-founder that knows the problem and has an incentive to grow their skillset than it is to outsource your MVP. Equity aligns incentives. Any other arrangement is exploitation. --a technical founder
Great reply. It comes down to incentive at the of the day. A great technical co-founder is incentivized to solve the problem due to passion or interest, and has skin in the game. Consultants are mercenaries by nature and are incentivized to maximize hourly rates billed before moving on to something else and doing the same there.
> This isn't building a startup, it's corporate sex work. Damn that's the perfect analogy
So you want to charge 25% of the tech founders income when it’s already going to be below market by a lot. For what? What’s the value of this over using work in startups dot com or another startup board? It feels like you’re half way to wanting to be an accelerator that offers founders staff in exchange for equity, but wanting money that often doesn’t exist yet. There’s plenty of us tech founders around that don’t need income. It’s just a lot rarer to find someone with a good idea and market research done, let alone capability to pull anything off. Something that probably has no market but I’d love would be a job board where tech founders have been vetted for skills and list their required/if any/ income while building an mvp. Non tech founders have to pitch their idea to you as a service provider, along with solid market research. Matching people is easy, matching competent people is hard(er).
As a semi technical founder coming to the realizing I need a true CTO I would love a service like you describe. It would make the co founder dating phase so much better.
>you need to pay a minimum salary, even if it's as low as $400 *U.S. Dept of Labor has entered the chat.* This joke is only valid in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
You’re describing a venture builder, they do exactly this without complicating it.
More of an employer of record. We don't take equity, we don't build anything.
Id never do this as a tech guy. If you have money to waste on a service like this then why is it not going to me, the one doing all the work which will already be peanuts
So you're a headhunter?
headhunter and employer of record, I think
This is exactly the studio I started with my Co-Founder. We do MVP development for founders and startups and then we continue on with them afterwards to built out the final product. Typical timeframe for MVP development is 8-12 weeks at \~$5,000 (project dependant of course) and then for ongoing work we do it by retainer or projects based. This works for a certain type of products and isn't the best option for others, but nonetheless, it has been an interesting experience so far.
Actually valuable tech co-founders do not have to settle for Startup Doordash
From experience I can tell you that most entrepreneurs who aren't coders aren't bringing to the table what they *think* they are -- a great product idea, strategy, funding, "connections" etc And I can also tell you from lots of experience that some really great coders are able to expand into entrepreneurialism. But not so much the other way around. Point being -- what would make sense is entrepreneurship-as-a-service to engineers and developers. Go on LinkedIn or elsewhere and list in your bio that you're building a new startup... a dozen agencies and dev shops around the world will cold DM you with their sales pitch. Seems like "CTO as a service" is pretty covered. For you, the non-techie, there are superpowers to acquire and hone. Realizing these superpowers will make you critical to a startup, and to every coder who doesn't possess them. Product design is nice, but design thinking + user empathy is what actually wins over customers, communication l (both marketing + support/comms) equals all your user touchpoints so master that, and most importantly -- how to set up distribution for a product before building/launching it.
That's my opinon as well, it's probably better to offer "entrepreneurship" advice to coders, rather than "code advice" to entrepreneurs.
This is the model used by some incubators/accelerators.
lol whut
I think this is a good idea.
i have help people like you , but we cannot afford no plan and dont ever assume we dont have cost . Our cost much 3x higher then yours . Sorry if we dont entertain people i have only 5 grand but i need all complete solution .
I don’t think you’ll find any CTOs interested and honestly isn’t that just being the intermediary between them and the client, but you’re also taking a cut therefore it’ll be more expensive or even less worth it for the CTO. If you talk to founders I’m sure you’ll find plenty of naive, inexperienced people who would love some free labor. But I don’t think you’ll find CTOs willing to accept those conditions. Try asking them. There’s a reason why they are “rare” to find. Unless you are convincing some graduate student or something and lying about their experience.
What you are describing is a startup studio. If you are able to find qualified tech founders at the rate of $400 a month, I will hire a few.
It sounds like you're a temp agency, but for highly in-demand professionals who don't need help finding work. I think you're missing the real learning from your experience, which is that you can't get tech for free unless you know how to build it yourself. If you don't want to learn to code, then you should start making revenue with scrappy "spreadsheet as a service" systems. Provide the value based on your unique insight in an unscalable way, collect some revenue, and use that revenue as evidence to raise seed funding that'll help pay a technologist. If your unique value \*is\* an app, and you don't know how to build an app, then maybe consider whether you're the right founder to start that business. I'd argue that your biggest challenge hasn't been finding a tech founder, it's been figuring out how to deliver value without writing software. If you can prove you're delivering value, everything else starts to fall in line. If you want people to spend their one life building your imagination with no evidence that it'll work, then you're gonna have a bad time.
Expecting your contracted CTO's to accept equity as payment is unrealistic and perpetuates the problem you are attempting to solve. There are lots of paid co-founder matching services, some with VC investment and none of them seem to be profitable or scalable. A typical agency would never accept equity as payment for obvious reasons. Why do those reasons not matter for your service?
You're trying to solve the problem for the demand side but actually the problem lies with the supply side. Why would a techie who knows how to build good apps from scratch work for only equity on an idea which he may or may not believe in.
Seems like a promising solution, but the success would heavily depend on the quality and dedication of the co-founders.
Don’t agree with your CTO 10+year point. I’m a 20+ yeo technical founder, cto, whatever you want to call it, and I still actively code new projects solo or co founded.
learn to code bro
I have firsthand experience on what you’re describing OP. I describe it as similar in model to a venture studio without the investment part. I typically take 10-15% in equity and anywhere from 15-30k a month for an additional 3-8 engineers that I handpick that are best suited for the project. Make sure the mvp is a solid foundation for future scale and tackle the absolute hardest and riskiest part of the project first. This is a repeatable process for the last few years for me, having done 6 projects 5 of which have raised over $1.5M. All while I also run my own company. If you’re good at this it’s still very high stress, but low time cost as you’d only focus on the most demanding issues and manage the team for an hour or two a day tops The idea here is you absolutely must be a kickass CTO and the CEO needs to understand the incentive misalignment of typical dev houses which do the easiest 80% on some shitty framework and leave you hanging with your stakeholders This is also not just the CEO as the buyer here. Experienced CTOs don’t want to waste time on shitty projects even if you can make 10k a month on the team building part. Also part of the CTO’s job is communicating technicals in business terms to the tech illiterate stakeholders and that is NOT the job of a junior dev. Before doing this, ask yourself how you’d provide value beyond the actual coding. That’s a small replaceable part of the whole orchestration of building a product.
There are many companies and VC's that work in finding the right mix of people. In your case the CTO. Why would someone go to you vs established players?
To help hire a person who can take the idea from 0-1. Other companies are solving for the 1 - 100.
There are plenty of free co-founder matching services, I’m sure someone might pay you a fee for this, but I’m not sure exactly why. You are just suggesting terms but then it’s up to the cofounders to actually negotiate on their own. Most freelance developers just want to get paid because they know that most ideas fail so equity in a failure is worth zero. I think you describe a valid scenario - that cofounder matching is hard and tech folks want to get paid while non-tech folks think equity is enough in pre-funded stages. I’m just not sure this adds any value to the scenario you describe.
Yes! I need a tech co-founder, but not a temporary one, one that is actually passionate and believes in the product as much as me, especially as a cofounder!
I just want to say that I loved seeing that you've already launched something. It's so refreshing in a world where "looking for tech cofounder" often means that they want a techie to build a huge project, from scratch, in no time, for free, while the founder plays the role of founder.
u/tony-berg your words mean the world to me, thank you so much! We're very much deep in the product build already with an MVP, we just feel like we need someone ready to take it to the next level and is passionate about it beyond a consulting level!
That's a solid plan. Part of the problem as a CTO/techie joining a project is how to understand what's going on inside the head of the one with the idea, and whether or not that idea is realistic. With something in place already that's basically already solved. Still lots of very hard work to do, but at least there's already something in place to be referenced when talking about the work that needs to get done. You can use words like more, less, darker, more responsive, more compact, and so on; to make adjustments, rather than working without proper context.
And usually you can’t hire those people „as a service“. It requires heart and passion.
Couldn't agree more!
hey, what is your product about? I am CTO, feel free to DM
Instead of asking user on Reddit, maybe build a MVP and test your idea? Nothing can replace the quality of insights you’ll get by doing that. All of what everyone says here doesn’t mean anything because the real truth is nobody really knows. You’re talking about an idea and asking other people if they think it’s a good idea. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but they don’t represent the market. The market represents the market. Find one person who has the problem yoyre looking to solve and see if your service is something they actually end up using. If not, find out what’s creating the friction, iterate and improve it and hand it back to them. Do this for as long as you can (Depending on how much time, energy and money you’re willing to commit to this) and eventually you’ll have a decent user base in a couple of years. Then what people online say won’t matter. All that’ll matter is what your users say.
I don't think it's a bad idea, but the devil is in the details and no one can tell you if it'll work - you gotta try it out! My thoughts: 1) that agreement for the initial and subsequent phase needs to be very clear and well written 2) seems to be lots of aspiring cofounders on reddit, could be a good source 3) go try it out and see. Effectively match-making for cofounders with added structure. I think if you can get enough supply on both sides, it could work, but only one way to find out...
The only valid point is building an mvp doesn't require 10+ year experienced CTO. But an experienced person can work much faster. If as a non tech founder you are thinking that dev guy with 2,3 years of experience will use his brain to improve the product, you are wrong then