How Do You Create A Tech Startup As a Non-Technical Person
It took me a long time to find a solution to this problem.
I always kept this strategy for myself, but it’s 2019 now, maybe it’s a good time to release it.
A few years ago I had a great idea, and I was willing to do anything to make it work.
The only problem was that this idea was extremely complicated (tech wise).
As a marketing enthusiast, I have a lot to bring to the ‘table’ when it comes to marketing strategy and creating buzz on the internet around a project.
Despite my marketing prowess, I’m really not a tech person.
So I looked for a partner:
I searched for the right partner, Someone that have the right tech skills to develop my idea and even more important, someone I trust.
After a few weeks, I convinced one of my friends to join me, he was about to finish his computer science studies at the university, and it seems like a perfect match.
We worked on the project for four months, mostly in the basement at my parent’s house.
We quickly realized three things:
- The tech complexity in this idea required us to recruit a data scientist to our team.
Finding a good data scientist that is willing to work for percentages in the idea is a difficult task, especially in Israel where the average salary for a data scientist is $80,000.
Entry Level Data Scientist Salary (Israel)
It’s not that easy to convince someone who has that great alternative to come and work with you on an idea! - With only one programmer in the team, it could take us more than six months to just reach the Proof of concept (PoC) stage.
- We both needed to leave the other things we did in life and focus ONLY on our project. We also need to be prepared to live for a long time on our savings.
We came to a crossroad, and from being incredibly positive, my programmer started to have many doubts and eventually he decided to take a job offer he got right after he finished his studies.
So I was left alone.
Without a programmer.
After four months of work.
What made things worse, was that I didn’t know what to do with the code he left behind.
Even worse, I didn’t know what the tech requirements were for the near future, and what we should do next (My developer didn’t know because we only needed to recruit a data scientist to solve a few problems).
If the startup world was a food chain, the life of the non-technical tech founder would be at the very bottom.
After a few days of depression and 24/7 Netflix, I decided to look for a solution!
Back then I was using Upwork very often.
This was mostly for small projects.
I was aware of the fact that there are incredibly talented freelancers on this platform.
It was very common when I was posting a job to get few offers from expert users that charge more than the budget I set for the project.
Then I had a great idea!
I split my project into 3–4 projects on Upwork. (So the full project stayed confidential).
Then I set a massively inflated budget for the project. (I think it was around 15,000$).
In the requirements, I asked the freelancers that applied to that task to send me a detailed plan on how exactly they would solve my problem, step by
step.
In the job preferences, I set it so experts will be able to apply to my job.
A few hours later I found my self with 50+ data scientists experts sending me complete details on how exactly they will solve my problem, which tools/programming language and libraries they plan to us, How the algorithm needs to look like and much more valuable information.
In less than a day I had made more progress in understanding my project tech requirements than I had in the four months that I’d been working on it with my first partner.
After I collected the best bits of expert advice from the job applications, I gathered it all into one place and organized it.
I split all of the information into two parts, and then I posted two new low budget jobs for beginner data scientists on Upwork.
After a few hours, I found two promising freelancers (I even had a video call with them and conducted an interview of sorts to make sure they were legit).
At the same time, I read a lot of information related to my project to understand it better. (I started to learn a few data scientists algorithms, how sentiment analysis works and more stuff related to my project).
I was always afraid to get too deep into the technical side of my project but learning it from a bird’s eye view was fascinating, and it helped me to better understand the difficulties in developing my idea and to come up with new creative ideas when problems showed up.
In less than three weeks and a few hundred dollars, the POC was live.
Building a tech company from zero, it’s a challenging thing, If you’re a non-tech person, don’t give up! Look for new creative ways to turn your great idea into a reality.
Good Luck!
More articles you might love:
- Why Startups Fail
- How do entrepreneurs live without a salary to sustain their families and pay bills?
Originally published at www.quora.com.
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