> "Non-technical founder needs technical founder to help turn crappy prototype into product. The idea is good, but I know how much I need your help."
Not all technical co-founders want to hear that. I see tons of inquiries that say something like "turn prototype into product", and that activates a lot of likely-seeming guesses about their product thinking, tech debt burden, and how they see the technical co-founder or first hire... and none of them are positives.
I want a non-technical co-founder to have skill and appreciation for: domain, product, business, and fund-raising. That's a ton of work and skills to develop, I know I don't understand all of it, and probably there are entire abilities some individuals have that I don't even know exist. And they should know that I'll bring a comparable pile of abilities and appreciation of difficulty, including some things overlapping with theirs, some things they don't understand, and some things they don't even know are things.
(I'm sure there are technical co-founders who see the role differently, and maybe more like a junior programmer hired to grind code and knock off sprint tasks, but that's not the holistic technical co-founder role that I see.)
Not all technical co-founders want to hear that. I see tons of inquiries that say something like "turn prototype into product", and that activates a lot of likely-seeming guesses about their product thinking, tech debt burden, and how they see the technical co-founder or first hire... and none of them are positives.
I want a non-technical co-founder to have skill and appreciation for: domain, product, business, and fund-raising. That's a ton of work and skills to develop, I know I don't understand all of it, and probably there are entire abilities some individuals have that I don't even know exist. And they should know that I'll bring a comparable pile of abilities and appreciation of difficulty, including some things overlapping with theirs, some things they don't understand, and some things they don't even know are things.
(I'm sure there are technical co-founders who see the role differently, and maybe more like a junior programmer hired to grind code and knock off sprint tasks, but that's not the holistic technical co-founder role that I see.)