Non-technical founders from zero to profit? | Hacker News Reader

Non-technical founders from zero to profit?

5 pointsfaitswulff8 comments

Are you or do you know of any non-technical founders who have gone from a concept to company?

Put differently, how do you start from zero (connections, employees, funding)?

I have worked for a company with two non-technical founders that built a $1.5-2 million dollar business over the course of 10 years.

The first founder had a wealth of specific industry knowledge (Insurance Denials management for physician practices) and the second founder was the biz dev genius who had built and led large sales forces at previous roles in Healthcare IT.

The two of them ran the company with only one technical contributor who was actually a contractor and only came on full time as CTO nearly three years after they first started.

In my conversations with them, it seems that they succeeded due to the following:

1) Hitting upon an untapped, but highly profitable niche with little to no competition very early on. 2) A strong early sales team that quickly learned how to sell the product effectively. 3) Getting lucky with the first technical contributor being dedicated, talented, and highly efficient with limited resources.

I'm reading this as:

1) Market, 2) Sales, 3) Hires, which is great. But how do you find that first, incredible technical contributor?

Like I said, there was a lot of luck involved with finding their first CTO that carried them to the first 2 million in revenue.

Unfortunately for him, he was let go after 10 years and didn't negotiate enough equity to be comfortable afterwards.

Stories like that are all over the place and it's one of the reasons a dedicated, incredible technical contributor is more likely to start their own thing than hitch their wagon to someone else who might screw them over in the long run.

I fit into this category. Put it this way, it takes time, hard work, persistence, more time, and money. The first version of my site was nothing but a wordpress blog. I eventually hired someone to build the version that I had mapped out on paper, and it now is 3 years later and very profitable :).

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Would you mind telling a little more and linking to the site?

Basic Web Technology - PHP/ Ruby on Rails or ASP.Net is not that difficult to learn. It may be a good idea to know the basics. I am not a pure techie and am building a web app. It took more than a couple of months to find the right techie. In the mean time, I outsourced development on ODesk so that there is some momentum by the time I build my own tech team. Now we are almost at the verge of launching our first app. It is certainly do-able. Takes a little longer and costs a little more. But in any startup, the cost of building the first iteration of the product is not the most significant. But you absolutely must have clarity on what your product is and who is going to use it.

I know several. They're doing quite well. They sold stuff, hired people to build it, and in a some cases, raised money. It's really no different than it is for technical folks. It's trickier because development costs more, but it can be done.

I am in the process of trying to do so right now. The most important thing I've learned after about 5 months (2 weeks pre launch now) is that you should learn about the "technical stuff" as much as you can along the way. You don't even have to learn how to do everything, but being fluent and knowledgeable about the various languages and programs is a huge plus.

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