How do you navigate and develop a technology product if you can’t code or have so much money? Obvious answer will be to look for someone to join you as co-founder but that is difficult. Not everybody will believe in your idea and certainly not have the same passion as you…
It depends entirely on how much it matters to you. If you don’t know anyone who can act as a co-founder, that would represent the idea you have formed, or you are unable to clearly define the idea enough to be able to outsource it to a freelancer, then you would ultimately have to learn, little by little, on your own.
Ultimately, you want to be able to communicate your vision, to yourself and anyone you intend to bring on board - without an idea of the product in bite sized chunks, it’ll be hard, even for the most seasoned developers and designers to be able to build, so you definitely don’t want to be the person lacking in appreciation for the technology, design and experience surrounding your product. I feel you end up missing out on things that could enhance the pedigree of your product.
So learn how to code. And surround yourself with people that see your vision, enough to want to be a part of it. Technology and programming isn’t as mysterious as people make it out to be, not even the Lisp dialects. Learning material is very widely available and there’ll be a following - however small - once you have an idea in mind that you’re able to translate, even into a rough sketch of an idea. Speak and surround yourself with those cleverer than you are. More seasoned in the industry. Show them your idea. And only talk to illustrate a point. Attend conferences, network with people who understand the market, and learn the basics at least of programming, enough to be able to build simple Ruby on Rails, or Node programs.
You will find that people will take your creativity, and imagination to advance their own goals. Never quite reaching targets that you envisioned. Be open about your ideas, but never too direct about implementing them until you find someone who is dedicated to work with you.
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Go to eLance, get someone to build you an MVP, trust me it’s cheaper than building here in Nigeria. Try to raise money after that and see if you can hire good hands around here.
This was quite an exposition. Thanx
This is an amazing answer.
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Very spot on.
If your product is going to help us locate the missing Nigeria satellite in space (meaning: your PRODUCT is hinged on proprietary technology and the success of your is a function of that technology) then go and learn how to code or at least how to write the algorithm.
If your startup is just a service company with a web front (ecommerce, blog, rental service) ie the success of your company doesn’t depend on the technology, but on the quality of the service delivered by you (whether or not it was enhanced by technology), forget coding! FORGET CODING, forget freelancers, just get started. Stitch wordpress/andromo together with google docs and social media accounts and start getting yourself some early customers and feedback. It will be more valuable to you than technical skills TRUST ME!
If what you have is somewhere in the middle, chances are you can start a basic version of the overall idea with wordpress.
Bottom line, know when to separate the tech from the startup so you can start gaining traction as quickly as possible!
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I keep getting emails about this question…I was going to start a topic about it, but Radar let me know there was an ongoing conversation about it 
, so I’m just gonna drop this here.
In addition to @mstuapha’s great answer to the question, Joel Gascoigne, Buffer founder and CEO has some more excellent and practical advice.
I honestly believe that building your product yourself is the most optimal and in fact the fastest path to creating a successful startup.
It might seem counter-intuitive that building the product yourself could be the fastest way to success, when you don’t even have any coding ability at all. The thing is, I’m not talking about coding — I’m talking about building your product. In any way that you can. That could mean zero coding, or it could mean picking up things here and there (which I think is great, too).
The reason I think it’s the fastest path is that I believe you’ll struggle to find a great technical co-founder if all you have is your idea. And, I think if you work with a freelancer or agency, it’s unlikely you’ll have a working relationship that lets you cycle through the build-measure-learn loop and iterate towards product/market fit.
So, my recommended approach is to hack it together yourself, and at the same time keep meeting technical people in your local startup community. I believe there’s an inflection point where what you have is attractive enough for a technical co-founder to jump on board. If you don’t have a technical co-founder (or someone technical willing to join as first employee), I think you just keep hacking and doing customer development and validating your assumptions, to create something that gets traction.
Read the full post here: My advice to non-technical founders.
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Thanks. I haven’t seen this.
There’s also this article by Adii Pienaar, who co-founded Woothemes: http://adii.me/how-anyone-can-create-a-tech-startup/. I came across it a few days ago, it’s also up the alley of some of @mstuapha’s thoughts.
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Gbam! This is the most commonsense answer to every ‘should I get a techie co-founder’ dilenma 
"So many people fall into this trap of unnecessarily teaching themselves how to code to fulfill present or future business ideas. “Let’s revolutionize technology,” they say.
What a lot of people miss is that they can still revolutionize the technological world without physically building their idea. Building is what legitimate computer programmers are for. It’s much more efficient to hire the average university trained programmer to do that grunt work — and to do it well. Doing so actually has benefits that most don’t consider: people are forced to develop the skill of talking code…"
Excerpt from this article I stumbled on a couple of weeks ago… https://medium.com/@kevshah95/don-t-learn-to-code-learn-to-talk-code-87e5b7035e7f
Wow, this is a great answer. I run JarusHub. We call ourselves startup, but not a tech startup. This sumarises what we do: “If your startup is just a service company with a web front (ecommerce, blog, rental service) ie the success of your company doesn’t depend on the technology, but on the quality of the service delivered by you (whether or not it was enhanced by technology), forget coding”