Non-Tech Founder's Guide to Tech [2023]

So you have an idea for an ‘app’ (or whatever) but you don’t have a technology background, and so you can’t physically make the thing yourself.

This guide is for you!

Even if you are clueless about technology and how things are built, there are still many things you can usefully understand, in order to be a more successful founder.

What are the things that really matter?

For most founders, the two most important considerations are time and money. You’ll generally want to optimize for both: if you could turn your idea into reality tomorrow, for no cost, that would be ideal. Short of that, there are some things to consider:

• Your idea might be time-dependent. That could be because the market has a need right now, and that need will pass, or the need will likely be met by someone else
• In time, you (or your spouse) might get sick of the idea. Enthusiasm for an idea can decay, both for good reasons (the idea wasn’t that good to start with) and bad (your attention moves; life circumstances change)
• Getting your idea to market - or having it in the market - might bleed you out e.g. you have $1,000 to spend, but your product costs $200/month to run. After 5 months, if it’s not generating cash, it’s now a serious burden

So, for these reasons and many more, you’ll want to:

1. Try to get the thing into the market as soon as practical
2. Minimize how much money you spend on getting it into the market (ideally $0)
3. Have it cost as little as possible while its in the market (ideally $0)

These are the major considerations we’re applying when we talk about technology below. Because the decisions you make as a founder - even as a non-technical one - can and will impact how the technology plays out.

Time vs Money

The first thing to say about time and money, is that they will generally trade off of each other. Getting to market the quickest, without going through a process to minimize the ongoing costs, will cost you the most. If you have the money this is okay, because getting into the market ASAP is incredibly helpful in almost every other way.

However, if you are budget constrained, things can and should take more time. By which I mean to say, you can use time to your advantage in particular ways. For example, I insinuated earlier than a good reason to give up on an idea is because it’s bad - by the process of getting something to market being a bit of a slog and a bit costly, it does test the commitment you have to the idea - before you’ve bet your house on it.

But assuming your idea is good (or at least worth properly testing out), if you have time, it is possible to get the money aspect down to $0.

How do the things get built?

You are probably aware that there are such things as software developers (synonyms: developers, software engineers) but it’s worth knowing that there are different types of developers. These developers have different specialities, which makes them good at certain bits of building a whole application, but unwilling or unable to build other bits. Depending on the nature of your idea, you are going to need either a team of people with different specialities, or you might be able to find a single individual who is cross-trained enough to capably build all the bits of your idea. We call these people “full-stack developers” and there are very many less of them than the other kinds of developers.

Agency vs Technologist Co-founder

Roughly speaking, you have two paths to get your product built:

1. Find a technologist co-founder
2. Find an agency who can build your product

I won’t go through the mechanics of how you do the finding (perhaps another article…), so I’ll focus on what these two paths mean for you as a founder.

If your technologist co-founder is also a full-stack developer, then you could be in a situation where it costs you $0 to get your product into the market. This is a pretty desirable outcome, but it’s worth noting that you’re probably going to trade time for that. Why? Well, there are some things to be aware of about technologists (speaking as one!):

• Trying out new technology is super fun for us. We might see the blank-sheet-of-paper of a startup as an ideal opportunity to try out the latest and greatest tech. But that comes with a lot of time risk, as we tend to go down dead-ends, and have to retrace our steps, or something even newer comes out that we simply have to try out
• Because we’re good at building things, that doesn’t mean we’re good at designing things. In fact, even if we’re usually good at designing things that other people build, we can also be bad at designing things we ourselves are building. That means the thing we build might need a LOT of additional work before YOU are prepared to test the market with it
• Time can be a black hole for us. It’s very, very common for the thing we thought we’d spend an afternoon on, to still not be done a month later. And we can’t tell you why in a way that you will ever understand. These time sinks are exacerbated if - and this is likely - the co-founder has a day job: the black holes will occur in the day job as well, but will always take priority

On the other hand, if you pay an agency to execute your idea, then - because your money is probably limited - the time the agency spends on your thing will also be limited. So you’ll have your product in a finite period of time, with a known cost, and if you want more or different things later, then it will cost more after that. But you should consider this path as time-efficient.

I would still say having a technologist co-founder who can build your product for $0 is a very good thing, but you may need to be very patient, and be very clear on the time-dependency of your idea.

How hard is it to build things?

Easier and easier, depending on what you want to build. The key question for you is - does it have to be an app? By ‘app’ I mean something that can be downloaded from the Apple Store or Google Play and installed onto a phone or tablet. As opposed to just a website that you could use in the browser on a laptop, or in the browser on a phone or tablet. You might have just assumed your idea was an app, and might be shocked why I’m even asking.

I talked earlier about developers, and how there were full-stack ones. This isn’t the complete picture. The main components of any modern tech product are:

• The “front-end”, which are the screens the user sees and interacts with. This could be a website front-end, or an app, or both
• The “back-end”, which are the ‘servers’ the front-end communicates with, to retrieve and save data
• The database, which is where all the data is stored

There can be more than this, but your product is probably going to have at least these 3. The full-stack developers I talked about earlier are generally able to do all 3 of these things for you, with a big caveat: Only if your thing has a website front-end, and not an app front end! To be clear, it is certainly possible that there are full-stack developers out there who can do websites and apps: but that number of people is dramatically smaller than full-stack developers who can do all the bits except apps.

There’s good reasons for this: in 2023, building apps is still a total pain in the behind. It’s - at best - slightly less painful than it was 5 or even 10 years ago, which is disappointing to a technologist like me. On the other hand, building website front-ends, and the back-end and the database, has become dramatically easier, which means cheaper and quicker.

If you think you can get away with not having an app, then I would say don’t attempt to build one. If you must have one, I would go with an agency that does apps all day every day, and I wouldn’t do anything else i.e. I wouldn’t also try to build a website front-end. Once you have your app, the next unpleasant surprise for you is how awful it will be to improve it.

Apps still really suck

If you expect (you should) that your idea is going to evolve rapidly after it’s launched, and hence you are going to need to make frequent changes to your product as you learn, then I have some bad news for you. The app stores - and I am specifically talking about the Apple Store - will ruin your life, and make you wish you’d built a website front-end instead. If you had, you could update that thing 100x a day if you want, and your users will always get the latest version. But with an app, you might have to be prepared to wait several weeks (months is not unheard of) for each and every update to make it through Apple’s tedious approval process. And if you make some trivial mistake, like having an icon the wrong size, you’ll have to resubmit and wait several more weeks (or months) again.

So my strong advice is, if you can live without you product being an app, do that for as long as you can. I would wait until at least you’ve validated that your business is viable.

Running Costs

In the Very Olden Days, to have your product live and available to users you would buy a server and park it under your desk. Then in the Olden Days “Cloud” was invented, and you could just rent space on servers already on the internet from AWS (Amazon Web Services), and then Azure (Microsoft) and later GCP (Google Cloud Platform). Somewhere along the way, these cloud providers realized that some startups grew, and because it was hard to move clouds, then getting lots of startups using your cloud was good for business. So they created “free tiers” and other incentives so that startups could run mostly or completely zero-cost, until either they became viable, or some timeframe passed.

That ‘free’ timeframe is typically 12 months. Spoiler alert: probably you’re going to take longer than 12 months to build your product and start making money. Just understand that and assume that now.

Fortunately, these are not the Olden Days anymore, and there are a new set of cloud providers that not only let you run free forever (while you’re small) but then the cost of success is also much, much lower.

The bottom line is that these days, you can run your product for $0 in a proper setup, and fees will not become a significant concern of yours until you have a significant business.