If you’re non-technical and what to work recruit and engineer, start by working with a designer and get some mockups. This will give you 1000% more credibility when you to start engaging engineers. Setting up a landing page and putting together a good set of mockups can probably be done in 2-4 weeks.

Once you have both assets in hand, run the CTO search process similarly to how you’d run customer discovery. Create a target persona based on your technical co-founder’s industry background, domain expertise, years of experience, etc. Make a list of target Linkedin or Twitter profiles and ask them for feedback on the feasibility of the product you’re looking to build. Remember that this is not recruiting. This is pre-recruiting.

Approximately 1 out of 5-10 engineers you reach out to are likely to agree to a meeting. By the end of the first meeting, your goal is learn everything you need to know about what it will take to build a project like yours,

• How much time?
• How many people?
• What APIs needed?
• What other tools or subscriptions?
• What foreseeable technical challenges?

You want to feel pretty clear about what the engineering lift entails, because it will only make your pitch stronger with the every consecutive engineer you chat with. If the engineer is intrigued with your idea, they’ll either ask or follow up with more business questions… How will you find funding, when do you plan to raise, etc?

Always ask at the end if there’s anyone they know they think might find this project interesting. Also mention that you’ll be recruiting 3-4 college CS majors as interns to help with the hardcoding. If an engineer is interested in the project, this will alleviate a lot of stress on their part knowing that they wont have to hard code the project themselves. If you post a JD somewhere like wellfound, you’ll get 30-40 application in the first couple of days. When you find an interested CTO candidate, ask them if they’d be open to running a techincal interview with the intern candidates, so that they are essentially selecting their own team.

When it comes down to comp and ownership. Be honest with them. There’s no money yet. Still, a game engineer will be open to the idea of working with each other nights and weekends for 3 months just to feel each other out. You just have to be clear about what success looks like on the engineering side, fundraising side and customer acquisition side. The division of labor should be him or her running everything technical, you running everything customer and fundraising-related, and the two of you meeting half way on product ideas and questions. Oh yea, its worth it to get a contract designer or design intern to work with you throughout the process as well. Fiverr or Upwork might be a good place to start.

Pitch it. Most technical people can be wooed like customers. I’ll hear you out if you like and provide some feedback.

Build it yourself on a no-code platform, like Bubble. Then when you find product/market fit and get some traction, you can hire a CTO instead, retain majority ownership, and avoid the headache of bringing on a co-founder or investors.

Like other have said, you can use bubble and MAKE.

What is your USP with the contracts?

I found my cofounder through my past work. We hadn’t worked a lot together but we knew each other. I worked in a tech company so it’s easier. I’d recommend going to events and meet ups. Spend some time working together before committing. You will have to make the decision using incomplete information, but there’s no substitute for working together even if it’s just a few weeks.

The fact that you validated your idea looks promising to check it out IMO.
I work in tech myself and I’d like to know more about your project, send me a message. Anyway if it’s not what I was searching for I’d like to help you with finding a candidate

Tell me your idea, I’m co founder and CTO of BoloForms.com and looking to get into a niche saas soon 💪 and was looking for someone with domain knowledge in legal for a long time, I already have the best team of bizz devs, devs, marketing etc etc and have experience in developing saas from last 5 years, and 1 saas exit, 1 saas bought. If I like your idea we can build out the mvp within 2 weeks. Please DM if you’re interested in taking over a meet

Ps: I don’t run agency or some shit like that. I am a saas founder and don’t like the concept of agency whatsoever

YC Co-Founder matching. It’s like Tinder for founders.

I met my business partner through in an e-commerce software forum, many years ago. We collaborated and traded work for a while before starting a company together.

That was a natural process over a few years. We ended up building and eventually selling our business for a decent amount of money.

So a few ideas:

• Seek out forums that are more domain specific and see if there are any software engineers / technical people there (yes, I can attest personally, tech people can also be into law / legal practice)

• there are communities where tech people and specifically CTOs hang (slack groups, email lists, etc) - network with technical people and see if someone can post there for you

• go to in-person events and rub shoulders with tech leaders - lots of events like this on meetup

I would strongly advise playing the long game and not jumping into a potential long term relationship with a technical co-founder until you get to know then and ideal do some real work together

You have an MVP and you’ve talked to customers. How much did it sell?

Lots of red flags here.

First of all I’d expect any decent lawyer to have the financial means to at least partially pay for tech work, so there might be something weird going on if they’d rather give away an equal chunk of the business.

Since I as a joining techie would rely on a founder like you to be well established with good domain knowledge that’s a concern. Or if you’re good at what you do, then I’d worry that you’re simply not good at business. Or I’d look at it like you wanting to simply not lose anything of (your) value if you wake up one day and have gotten bored with the business; or that you simply don’t believe in your own idea. So lots of red flags if someone with mostly an idea shows up promising too much of the future, but nothing in the now.

Secondly, AI simply isn’t anywhere near being able to do this work on its own. So when you talk about seconds rather than weeks I’m going to have to assume that you’re not talking about a support tool to help the lawyer quicker do their thing, and it’s a huge red flag if you expect AI to independently just replace a lawyer making sure a contract actually means what people expect of it and can survive being challenged. You either don’t understand your own trade, or you don’t understand the current limitations of so called AI.

Lawyers get paid good money because they’re needed, and because they can spot what might be a minor detail but still be the difference between a client having a successful business or a nightmare ending with a bankruptcy. AI can at most be a support tool to that.

Legal is also not sexy in the AI space

That’s because it’s not applicable in the way that people want it to be.

Show me a decent idea that actually would work, especially one validated with an existing MVP (like you say you have), and I would push people out of the way to have a coffee and a talk with that founder.

If you don’t see people come running it’s either because you don’t have what you think you have, or because you’re rubbish at explaining what you have. And either of that would be a valid enough red flag for competent techies to think of you as a waste of their time.

Check YC co-founder match its a great tool.

Why don’t you invest some money ?

there are alot of service based companies which can offer you with technical solutions, see if you can partner with them and get some traction, with traction i guess more people will be open.

u can get cheap technical workforce in India, like most startups.