ordinarily, I wouldnt reply to this - but this potentially affects my business, so here goes:
You dont need to be a good programmer to build a great software business. There are innumerable instances of non-programmers building great business. And especially while churning out your MVP, you could do much worse than outsourcing your product and instead, driving sales.
There is a bloated sense of elitism in writing your own code - while I certainly subscribe to "once a geek, always a geek" personality, the insistence that the CEO/CFO/CXO should be a coder is not entirely healthy.
I run an outsourcing business and our first few (and currently one) customer are Silicon Valley startups, some of which got acquired in the course of time. And we are not expensive - the lowest we have gone is 1/3rd the silicon valley salary rate for a 10 year experienced engineer (this was when the project was large enough).
As far as India is concerned, I have had an interesting discussion with @plinkplonk over here - India has orders of magnitude more people and engineers than most other countries. So yes, there is a high signal-to-noise ratio to finding people... not unusual in any large economy.
When comparing skill levels to countries like Eastern Europe, I will admit you have a better chance of finding good engineers there, just because you need to be very good to be able to make money like that. [[ Read what I just wrote AGAIN - I didnt say europeans are better than indians in general. I said YOU would have a better chance at finding them in a smaller place.]]
I wouldnt presume to go and tell you how to go and find your employees/outsourcing partners, but remember this: At the end of the day, India has a huge talent pool - in this day of an overheated Silicon Valley/NY job market, how do you go about leveraging this talent pool ? Use the fact that a good Indian salary is a fraction of American salary - these are the same people who migrate to silicon valley and pull a Vinod Khosla or Ram Shriram. There is no real truth to the fact that cheap==poor when exchange rates play to your advantage.
Just to clarify, the article didn't indicate that the CEO/CFO/COO needs to learn programming to get off the ground. The non-technical founder can at the least onboard a technical co-founder or build an internal tech. team.
If a non-tech. person outsources the product, how will he/she be able to figure out if the outsourcing firm is bluffing or creating bad products?
good question - and the answer to that is the way we got our first customers.
We used to do two weeks of work free and if they still wanted to work with us, the 2 weeks get retroactively billed. These days, we have a sufficiently low walk-away penalty for the initial weeks.
We never lost a customer.. and we did work with non-technical, although smart, people.
But there cases of those startups that primarily revolve around a tech idea, outsourcing the coding. If the crux of the idea revolves around sound programming, wouldn't it be better to have a tech team onboard than outsource it?
The irony : I am coding for a startup that found me somewhere on the internet.
You dont need to be a good programmer to build a great software business. There are innumerable instances of non-programmers building great business. And especially while churning out your MVP, you could do much worse than outsourcing your product and instead, driving sales. There is a bloated sense of elitism in writing your own code - while I certainly subscribe to "once a geek, always a geek" personality, the insistence that the CEO/CFO/CXO should be a coder is not entirely healthy.
I run an outsourcing business and our first few (and currently one) customer are Silicon Valley startups, some of which got acquired in the course of time. And we are not expensive - the lowest we have gone is 1/3rd the silicon valley salary rate for a 10 year experienced engineer (this was when the project was large enough).
As far as India is concerned, I have had an interesting discussion with @plinkplonk over here - India has orders of magnitude more people and engineers than most other countries. So yes, there is a high signal-to-noise ratio to finding people... not unusual in any large economy. When comparing skill levels to countries like Eastern Europe, I will admit you have a better chance of finding good engineers there, just because you need to be very good to be able to make money like that. [[ Read what I just wrote AGAIN - I didnt say europeans are better than indians in general. I said YOU would have a better chance at finding them in a smaller place.]]
I wouldnt presume to go and tell you how to go and find your employees/outsourcing partners, but remember this: At the end of the day, India has a huge talent pool - in this day of an overheated Silicon Valley/NY job market, how do you go about leveraging this talent pool ? Use the fact that a good Indian salary is a fraction of American salary - these are the same people who migrate to silicon valley and pull a Vinod Khosla or Ram Shriram. There is no real truth to the fact that cheap==poor when exchange rates play to your advantage.