I'm a solo non-technical founder building a very technical product without a CTO it's hard but folks who say it can't be done don't know what they're talking about here are 23 tactics for nontechnical solo founders that worked for me: 1. get a friend or advisor you trust who is or was CTO of a startup (no big tech eng managers please) and ask them to help you architect and hire - offer them equity if you need to. 2. ideally build in a space that isn't super technical, where the key innovation is business model, operations, or design related. 3. learn to design. it's the easiest technical skill to learn, helps you articulate your vision to eng hires, and makes you more embedded in the day-to-day of product development (which is crucial). 4. ask your engineers to walk you through technical concepts and decisions you don't understand. you'll pick stuff up faster and they'll appreciate you giving a shit. 5. own everything at your company that isn't writing code - operations, sales, support, design, etc. engineers love working in places where this stuff is just taken care of. 6. really really nail sales. nontechnical founders should be called sales/marketing founders. if you aren't doing this, you're going to fail. 7. ask a dozen friends who manage engineering teams what their process is and copy it. 8. cut down your roadmap. list the features you want to build that directly solve customer problems (that they'll pay to be solved) and remove half of them. nontechnical people always overshoot. 9. when in doubt, bias towards javascript (node, react, etc). it is much easier to hire than other languages. 10. occasionally ask a technical friend or advisor to review your codebase but be conscious of the "not my code" mentality where engineers will think anything they didn't write sucks. 11. hire contractors before you hire full time engineers - it is easier and helps you learn what good and bad engineers look like 12. ask other founder friends to introduce you to the best engineers they know just to get a sense of what these people are like so you can hire better or even ask them questions later 13. remember more traction actually makes it HARDER to bring on a technical cofounder if that's your plan 14. get fluent in basic application architecture. you don't need to know how to build something but you should know the difference between server and client. 15. small engineering teams are WAY faster than large engineering teams. do not over-hire. 16. early on you should focus on hiring full stack engineers, not specialists (barring a few exceptions). they can own features end to end. 17. even if you have nothing to do, being on Slack late at night when the team is working is important for morale. (but there is always something to do). 18. ask engineers about the complexity of features on your roadmap before you ask them to build. 19. you CAN get technical enough to be dangerous if you work at it. put in time after work to learn technical concepts and basic coding. it will help you build credibility. 20. remember bugs are part of the process - don't freak out when they come up. do QA on the product constantly and be a partner for your engineers to solve bugs. 21. own as many semi-technical things as you can like putting up your company's landing page or marketing automations. this also helps with credibility. 22. most importantly, BE HUMBLE. being honest about what you don't know and working your ass off is what inspires great engineers to work with nontechnical founders.

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