Stop everything else that you’re doing right now for your startup and learn to code. If you take the time to learn enough to build some small project, you’ll learn the language of talking to hackers, and you’ll earn some respect. 99% of non-technical guys looking for a technical co-founder won’t put in the effort. This is your single best way of standing out. You’ll learn to naturally see the value of Hacker News and Stack Overflow. You’ll learn to appreciate how things work. And hopefully you’ll enjoy it, which will allow you to have real conversations with hackers about what they do. Will Miceli wrote the best blog post I’ve ever read on exactly this strategy, including awesome links for getting started. Don’t know where to start? Zed Shaw will get you started.
Build the Front-End
What’s to stop you from building the front end of your site right now? You could get design done with 99 Designs, send it off to PSD2HTML, throw it up on Wordpress, and SHABOW! you’ve got a website. Of course, there’s no backend, no data, none of the special sauce that’ll make your concept work…BUT, you’ll have proved that you know how to market your idea and build a beautiful product. Hopefully, you’ll learn a ton about your product, but at the very least you can show an interested hacker more than a napkin business plan.
Throw up a Trial Balloon
I’m sure if you think really hard about it, you can come up with some real things that you can do to test your concept hypothesis. And I’m not talking about more MBA-type research. Hopefully, you already know the importance of customer development. Find a way to fake your concept so that users don’t know it’s not actually built yet. Take that front-end you built and funnel interested users into a beta waiting list. Having real users on a waiting list will help you earn a high quality technical co-founder because you’ll be pre-empting his biggest fear: that his work will be a waste of his time.
Build a following
Let’s say you’re building, for example, an automotive parts marketplace. Go start a blog serving the automotive community. They are your future users anyway, and you’re going to have to figure out a way to market to them. What better way than earning them now as readers and later converting them to users? And use Twitter to your advantage. Building up a following north of a 1000 people is hard because that’s more than just your friends. Which means you have to say interesting things and share helpful links. It’s marketing yourself. It’ll prove your intelligence and your marketing abilities to your future co-founder.
Spend Some Money
When a hacker joins an unproven, non-technical entrepreneur, he’s risking his most important asset: his time. Yes, you’re also risking your time, but you have different risk profiles. While he already knows he can code, neither of you knows whether you’ll be able to deliver as the business co-founder. You need to prove that you’ve got your proverbial skin in the game too. Go spend some money on offshore coders and get a prototype built. Or offer to pay a salary to your technical partner. My first technical co-founders started as employees. I paid them cash from day one using credit card debt. Over time, I earned their trust, and we became equal co-founders.
