The tech co-founder myth!

The prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley is that if you don't have a rock-star developer in your founding team then you have an uphill battle, if not an impossible one. I must admit that I have been fooled into believing this myself. But my experience as an entrepreneur and talking to other entrepreneurs tells me that this is not true. 

The biggest risk with most start-ups is product-market fit. Are you building something that enough people want and hopefully are willing to pay for?  As a start-up you need to figure out the cheapest and fastest way of answering that singular question.  This problem is non-trivial because it is non-deterministic. 

The risk and the competitive advantage, in most cases, is not around your ability to build the product. Building the initial version of most software products has become easy these days. More importantly, most of the time you don't even need to develop new software to assess product-market fit. It does help if you are technically savvy (not a developer) and are willing to roll up your sleeves with tools like Sketch, Invision, Unbounce, MailChimp, Ad tech, video content tools, freelance and crowdsourcing sites etc. Once you have the answer to the first question, it is easier to find believers/backers who will help you get the product built.  

So what is the advantage of having a developer as a co-founder? Having a developer as a co-founder is really helpful when the journey to product-market fit requires the development of software and refining it. It helps save precious cash if there is someone who is willing to do this for equity and is fully committed. What a developer co-founder is not important for is to determine the best architecture choices, as an example.

But in my experience creating software, commits you to a path based on what you want to build and not based on what users need (see the illustrative Venn diagram above to understand why that is a bad strategy).  If the team has the discipline and the courage to "throw away" software developed, then having a developer as a co-founder can be a great asset.

There may be a few situations where "build it and they will come" mindset works but those are rare.  We all have been sold the Steve Jobs story. It is a great story because it is rare. Most of us aren't Steve Jobs and his story is much more complicated than sound bytes that are thrown around like "customers don't know what they want". For most situations you should consider embracing the mindset of "build it only after you have sold it." 

I enjoy working with entrepreneurs who want to save time and money to see if there is a market for their idea, before building stuff.  Ping me if you fall in that category.

@vijayganti