I am a non-technical founder who has bootstrapped up to this point over the last 3 years by working a Finance 9-5 and paying developers to build the app.

Odds are that there are major technical issues that are hiding in what you’re not aware about, and business decisions you’re not aware about accidentally having taken simply by letting the tech be implemented the way it has.

Start by getting yourself an early startup-experienced fractional CTO with a technical background, to review where you’re at right now. As well as being able to act as a startup mentor to help you get your pitches etc ready for VCs.

You need that competency, as well as doing that work, before you’re ready to be invested in.

What happened with you a month ago hiring based on having the needed financing?

Your parameters are too narrow. A place decently busy in the evenings and into the night will absolutely be too busy during daytime. And you can’t have busy cafes without lots of noise, so it’s on you to get noise cancelling earplugs or headphones.

Let’s say that you ran into an investor that wanted to know more, so how much do you have prepared as far as budgets, pitch decks, business plans, branding, strategy, menus, market research, websites, drawings, 3D-renderings, supplier relationships, and so on?

Especially if this is your first time doing a business like this investors will know that you won’t be aware about all the problems and details that you have to deal with until you actually get to having to deal with them. Meaning that experience in the business in combination with wanting to do it yourself won’t be enough. They want to see that you’ve done all that you can, have solved all the problems that have been hiding in the details, and that their money would go straight to actually opening the business according to plans. They don’t want to pay for you to spend perhaps a year learning how to do a business like this, they want to invest in someone that’s ready to just do the business.

Can you simply go “I’ll send you the material” if an investor want to know more, or will you risk burning that bridge by looking like someone that just wants to excitedly talk about their grand ideas (like starting a chain without even proving the concept first)?

Investors want to invest, but you have to be prepared to be invested in, and that takes a lot of work to prove unless you’re already a successful serial entrepreneur.

So are you ready to actually be talking to investors right now? And if not, what would you need to get ready (that isn’t money)? What type of help or support would you need?

Why not do your own startup? Surely you have the cash and network to give it a proper go until some early private equity exit? Essentially a startup designed to be sold within 1-2 years.

Just don’t promise anything not contingent on certain progress. That should be basic common sense, right?

The only struggle to making your money is… making people give you money.

Your problem is that you’re looking at it like “if I only get a few customers this will work”, but you’re trying to enter a market that’s been cold emailed/spammed to absolute death for more than a decade.

No serious, and competent, buyer of your type of services will consider you without anything beyond your email/DM wanting them to pay for your services.

You’re facing a type of sale where the recipients have already seen every version of first sentence/subject line you could ever think of, and they now recognize it as something to delete unseen (if it even gets passed the spam filters).

It’s either a very high volume game (that could get you reported as spam often enough to burn your domain), or you need something more. You need something like personal introductions and recommendations. Or perhaps get yourself a collaboration with an angel investor using your services to quickly make all their projects look more professional.

To scale you ideally want those new projects without the very costly/time consuming process of randomly trying to reach random people that are completely unrelated to any other client or your business/network.

Take a vacation. Give yourself time to recharge, get bored, and experience things that you feel could be better.

Speaking as a techie:

I need a founder that talks about the business implications, not that tries to be my equal or fights me because some outdated or unrelated thing they once was told about tech.

You’ll learn what’s relevant to know by explaining your business needs and wants to your tech competent cofounders (or staff).

If you have a house built, will it have a basement? Will it have a loft? Will it have a pool? A bowling alley?

If you ask for it to be built it will have all that, right?!

Same with an app. It’s custom built according to your specifications and/or whatever the devs prefer to use/sell.

You have to ask for what you want, using very clear, written down, specifications/requirements. And you can’t just assume anything not written down and clearly communicated.

What you just wrote doesn’t make sense.

You want to make a “mobile first Wordpress”, which is a CMS, by using another CMS?

Practically you’re probably considered free programming labor rn.

They can’t, or don’t want to, pay for any development, so they get someone in charge of tech and expect them to do the work of a 5+ person team.

When you’re done they’ll probably do anything they can to replace you and make sure you don’t get any future money by getting you out before any cliffs etc.

Relevant (to your business) audiences are built based on them eagerly waiting for what you’re about to make available.

That makes it just another sale.

So how do you package and sell the experience of waiting for your future product as something that they want? What makes it worth their time to specifically be waiting for your thing? What do you have that they want?

By creating an environment that fosters open collaboration,

That sounds like extra work, for people already very busy.

which no one is doing,

In most cases, especially in well established fields, there’s a reason why certain things aren’t being done. Ranging from that it can’t be done, perhaps for legal reasons, all the way to the people involved straight up resisting any form of changes to their current tools and routines.

we break down barriers and expedite the journey from patent to patients allowing scientists to build on each other’s work.

That sounds like extra work, and it sounds like something five out of four legal advisors will shutdown at a very early stage. (Because in healthcare and IP there’s a surplus of 'em.)

All in all I’d expect anyone that could get interested to want to know a lot more before wanting to book a meeting.

Ideally your message should be a lot shorter. Like a short tl;dr, followed by a pitch deck that actually works inline in that same email (on a small phone as well as a laptop).

We’re talking 2-3 very short sentences that instantly tell the reader “we do this revolutionary thing”, followed by a deck that clearly show what you’ve got.

At each stage you get more and more time before you lose your audience before they get to whatever point it is that you’re trying to make, but it starts at almost zero time. It starts with the subject line to even get them to open your email, and then you only get those first few sentences to convince them to not go with the default action of deleting yet another spam/cold email. Each stage is a sales pitch just to get them to the next stage, where you get a little bit more time before you lose them.

The purpose of this message is to ask for an opportunity to meet you and show how this works How about this Thursday at 3:30 pm?

Personally my default reaction to a too specific date and time is a no, simply because odds are that I can’t instantly commit with a yes.

I tend to react more positively to questions that I can’t easily answer before mentally having come up with the answer that the other person want, like asking me when it at the earliest would be the most convenient for me to do a quick meeting.

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.

You simply haven’t got anything of any real value. If you could get a loan everyone would start a business in the US and get themselves a free $50k.

You’re an intern, so the CEO (and CTO) should take the lead.

You can’t from an intern position be the leader that create the business plan which the CEO and CTO are supposed to follow. It simply wouldn’t be fair to ask that of you, and there’s no way for you to have the authority to have people respect that business plan.

You could of course be the one that create the documents etc, but then you have to do that with the perspective that you’re only putting together like a draft or suggestion. At the end of the day the CEO (and CTO) need to put their authority into the business plan for it to actually be something that the business adhere to.

So, yes, or no, it depends, you could do the business plan; but you have to have your CEO give you the right scope and perspective on what that work actually entails. (And I would also add that as a business developer you if needed should advice him on these things.)

It’s as simple as you working part-time, and you shouldn’t overthink it beyond that. You charge them whatever you have to, and any longterm bonuses in the form of equity is basically there only to motivate you to stick around longer than you in most cases will want to (web search: cliff vesting).

What I do is that I start as a paid advisor, which essentially is a paid discovery phase. Then I slowly take on the responsibilities of a paid CTO. And only if all that works just fine I’d be willing to discuss equity as a way to keep me around (or to lower my salary).

That being said, personally I really want to work with very early founders as that’s where I can do the most to help, but that means that they’re also very inexperienced (which causes huge problems, and lots of arguments). So I’ve ended up having to focus on them paying my regular consulting fee from day one simply to weed out the too unprofessional dreamers. So if you’re being approached by more mature and professional teams, and get good terms, equity might actually have more of a real world value; just remember that it most likely has zero value until the day you’re able to actually sell it, so have a realistic plan for how to do that.

I’m going to assume that your whole business is as competently handled as your ability to read the rules of r/startups.

NDAs are only worth as much as the legal team enforcing it. And being morally in the clear means absolutely nothing if you can’t defend against the attacking team.

That said, it also depends on the NDA.

Practically it could mean that an expert working for a clueless/evil client never again can use their domain knowledge with another client, or it could simply be a case of “don’t talk about our projects within 6 months of learning about them”.

But red flags are red flags. Don’t consider compromising with people not willing to compromise with you, unless you’re financially forced to do so. Life sucks, and sometimes we have to gamble on other people not being as bad as they might be.