As a chemical engineering undergrad at MIT, I partnered with some friends, among them a computer engineering student, to try to launch a website. We never thought of our plight as launching an actual company, we mostly just felt like we had a great idea – a social networking site dedicated to helping users date friends of friends. We worked on the project for months, completely consumed with how cool the website would be, but not at all concerned with revenue streams, customer adoption, network effects, or hardly anything having to do with business.

Although certainly not always the case, it is often easy to fall prey to the excitement of a concept as an engineer. While many MBAs do not code, we certainly bring many skills that are still transferable to launching a tech startup.

A Market Focus Allows for Better Product Formation

There is value in honing in on a true market gap, exploring ways to address it with little regard to the technical ease of implementation, and focusing on opportunities for monetization. These skills allow you to design a site or software in a new and different way as compared to someone purely focused on the cool end product. It also helps you focus on addressing a market need with technology in a way that will create monetary value.

Traditional Business Tools Translate to Site Design

Many skills MBAs have can even translate well to site creation. An analytical mindset lends itself to identifying the key criteria that seem to make a website great and user friendly. Marketing knowledge can be applied to determining which existing user interface designs convey the look and feel that you desire for your product’s brand.

With this in mind, you can create your own mockup of the website or software. Even if you do not want to figure out mockup programs such as Photoshop or Balsamiq, certainly your finance, consulting, or corporate days honed your expertise in PowerPoint. And even PowerPoint can be an incredibly powerful tool for creating mockups for software or a website.  You can simply use the Snip or Printscreen elements of Windows to piece together aspects of other sites and create a mockup of your idea. Such a mockup goes a long way in explaining a concept to both a designer and a developer, and it shows that you have a clear plan for achieving a vision.

The Right Hypothesis is Better than the “Right Product”

The business world also touts a hypothesis-driven approach to problem solving. This is easily applied to tech startups. Instead of focusing on the excitement of building out a full blown product, focus on a hypothesis for customer needs and conduct an early test to determine whether you are correct. For many tech ideas, a minimum viable product is often as simple as creating a landing page that explains your idea and testing whether any potential customers try to purchase the software or enter the website. Today, there are plenty of third party programs such as Unbounce, Google Sites, Weebly, Yola, or Wix that make it easy to create a simple page. Using Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, or forums, you can drive potential customers to your site. With web analytics programs such as Google Analytics, you can get a sense for customer acquisition and adoption before even creating a full-blown product. These ideas are explored more deeply in Lean Startup concepts.

Having an MBA can be used as an asset rather than as an obstacle. Instead of focusing on the skills an MBA does not have in the tech space, MBAs can capitalize on the skills they do have that are still applicable.

 
I was at the MIT Startup Bootcamp last Saturday, listening to one of the highlights of the day: Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox. He received thunderous applause to his proclamation that “engineers make better startup founders because [he's] seen great engineers become great managers but he’s never seen a great manager become a great engineer, and you need both skills to be a startup founder.” This was one of many swipes that day targeting non-technical founders, and in particular MBAs. I texted my indignation to my HBS classmate sitting a few rows down. She replied: “Omg yes, just ridiculous. I need to find an engineer tho.”

Alright, enough with MBAs feeling sorry for themselves and claiming that they’ve got a great idea but first they need to “find” a technical co-founder. There are alternative ways for us non-technical founders to get it done. Here’s one such path…

“You don’t find a technical cofounder, you earn one.”

Before I dive into the meat of my recommendation, I’d like to dispel this notion that you can just find a technical co-founder. I was once foolish enough to think so. Last April, when I was ready to build the prototype for my online advertising startup idea, I emailed the Harvard and MIT engineering list serves kindly asking if anyone wanted to be my technical co-founder. I got all of zero legitimate responses and a rude awakening: it’s near impossible to recruit the right technical co-founder on the merit of an idea alone.

Later, I read an article; distributed by the Startup Digest; that echoed the lesson I learned and still resonates with me. Its primary thesis: “You don’t find a technical cofounder, you earn one.” With this lesson in mind, I make the recommendation below.

Outsource Your Way to an MVP

Before building a fully fledged business or product, Eric Ries, lean startup guru and evangelist, advocates building a minimum viable product (MVP), a bare bones prototype of sorts that allows you to test whether customers would want anything resembling the idea you had in mind. My recommendation to non-technical founders is to at least reach the point of building and testing an MVP without a technical co-founder in tow. Outsourcing the development of the MPV to overseas developers is a rational and economical way of doing so. 

After failing to solicit a technical co-founder in April, my business partner and I hired overseas contractors recommended by a friend to begin work on the MVP. The outcome was abysmal and we had to let those contractors go.

However, we didn’t give up. We tried our hand on oDesk.com, a marketplace for hiring contractors. We reviewed more than 50 developer profiles, narrowed the list down to 5 promising prospects, and finally settled on a freelance developer with stellar reviews. oDesk made a fan out of me because their reviews system is something of an insurance policy against hiring poor developers – you can filter out the developers with bad reviews and the ones with good reviews do their best to deliver positive results for fear of ruining the reputation they’ve build on oDesk. And the results this time were indeed remarkable. We’ve since completed a minimum viable product worthy of our beta customers’ time, and we continue to work with the developer we hired off of oDesk.

A few more quick tips on the topic of outsourcing:

• Hire a contractor on a full time basis rather than one that works for you part time. A dedicated developer is far more focused than a developer juggling multiple projects at one, and as a result produces better quality work with fewer delays.

• Hire a freelance, independent developer rather than one belonging to an agency unless your project requires multiple developers from the same agency. The former approach allows you to communicate directly with the developer and the hourly rate is often lower since an intermediary isn’t taking a cut.

• Expect to spend at least $5,000 to $10,000 on developing the minimum viable product. No matter how basic the functionality, these things take more time than you expect, believe me! And if you’re not yet confident enough in your idea to commit some money, how can you expect others, especially technical co-founders, to commit themselves to your venture.

Conclusion

Nat Turner of Invite Media, an online advertising startup with a successful exit, opined against hiring contractors stating that he’s “never seen a startup that relied on contract developers scale up successfully”. However, outsourcing the development is not an end in itself. It advances you to the point of having an MVP with which to gain customer traction and much needed validation, and moreover it proves you were scrappy enough to get it done despite your limitations. Armed with this validation, you may finally be ready to “earn” a technical co-founder or raise capital to attract the technical talent that you need.

By: Omar Restom (orestom at mba2012.hbs.edu), Co-Founder of Vaiad