It's ideal that at least one of co-founders has the technical skills to complete the project in mind. The best mix we found is the business/designer co-founder + the programmer co-founder. Having 2 tech co-founders isn't necessarily the best combo, but it's lean, and lean is good.
Also, if you don't have someone who can do the coding early on, it's okay too. We will introduce a bunch of different tools you can use to easily come up with a demo. We will also give you great ideas that will help you vaildate your product in 1 day. You can just look for someone after you have a demo and have already validated your idea.
Catch a technical co-founder!
When you do have a team though, the tech team should be able to fix bugs and iterate quickly. Some startups fail not because they have faulty features or a bad product, but because they are not able to fix them or roll out new features in time. Early adopters will keep supporting you unless if they see that your business is stagnant and their requests or needs are not met.
Note: Outsourcing is not ideal, because startups are based on building/measuring/learning and then iterating. Outsourced teams are usually not agile enough for that. However, if you still want to get someone else to build it for you (outsourcing), what could work is that you could use one of the services below to build your MVP but not launch it, get some feedback and traction so that you can attract a rock star co-founder. You could probably even apply for an incubator or get funding to move things forward.
Summly didn't build their own technology and sold it for 30M to Yahoo in 2013
Some great platforms to find awesome developers:
- oDesk - One of the most popular platforms
- Elance - Another huge freelancer platform
- Freelancer
- Guru - A very good one for startups
- vWorker
- Amazon Mechanical Turk - set up any task and get answers
- SkillsHive – become a/hire freelancer online
- GroupTalent – developers and designers on demand
- Or you could partner with Pivotal Labs, an incubator that helps you build your software.
Wireframing Tools - A way to create mockups of your product
- Read this UX tutorial first - Alan Wells
- Great list of rapid prototyping tools here - dan harrelson
- POP – Prototyping on paper for the iPhone
- Keynotopia – use PowerPoint/Keynote to create web/mobile apps – Cool!
- JustinMind– define web and mobile apps with interactive prototypes
- Lean Design - design using HTML5-editor and automatically convert it to XHTML/CSS
- Balsamiq– rapid wireframing tool. software mockups in minutes
- Napkee - export Balsamiq Mockups to HTML/CSS/JS and Adobe Flex 3 at a click of a button
- FluidU/I - mobile prototypes for IOS
- Draw.io – draw diagrams online
- Moqups - HTML5 App used to create wireframes, mockups or UI concepts
- MxGraph – client side JavaScript diagramming library
- Pencil- Firefox add-on to do GUI prototyping and simple sketching
- Lumzy – quick mockup creation and prototyping
- CSS Hat – Turn Photoshop layers into CSS3
- Mockflow – online/offline, extensible wireframing tool w/design library
- OmniGraffle – it’s been around before the web even existed
- Wirify – turn any webpage into a wireframe
- LucidChart – Cloud-based drawing tool
- InVision – UX Prototyping from jpg, .png or .gif files
- Cacoo – free online drawing tool
- Axure – Wireframing, prototypes: buil-in widgets and shapes
- HotGloo – Online Wireframing Tool
- Mocksup – Share your web site mockups
- Mockingbird - Mock it up and share web site wireframes
- Protoshare – website wireframing
- Gliffy – Online Diagraming
- Keynotopia - wireframing + high fidelity (pixel perfect) prototyping tool
- Free Wireframe templates for iPhone, iPad and Web
- Jotleaf - Create a beautiful website without any tech background
- Wireframing Tutorial
