Non-Technical Founders
For the purpose of this essay, “technical” only refers to engineering. Also, I know Steve Jobs was technical, but I want to see if anyone falls for the ragebait.
There’s an overwhelming amount of anti-non-technical founder propaganda floating around in startup world.
The role of a technical founder is clear: ship the product. In a software-driven world, solid engineering is a non-negotiable requirement. Any startup without technical manpower is actually just a hopeless collection of people and a pitch deck pretending to be a startup.
💰 The $1,000,000 dollar question: What do non-technical founders *actually* do besides cling onto 50% equity and pitch their idea to uninterested women?
People mostly classify non-technical founders as “idea guys” who tell engineers what to build and then go dilly dally on Twitter.
As a semi-technical person and a former non-technical founder, I would actually say this is valid most of the time.
My take is that a minority of non-technical founders can actually be an extraordinary asset to a startup if they do certain things right.
What should a founder be doing?
Startup founders must commit themselves to three simple responsibilities.
Create a valuable product for customers.
Scale the product to more customers.
Structure operations to support these two functions.
I’ve segmented this essay to cover each of these responsibilities and how a non-technical person can provide real value within them.
Creating valuable products
To create a valuable product, we can broadly simplify the process into 3 steps.
Understand your users and their problems.
Design a delightful user experience to solve those problems.
Execute upon your design.
All value begins in the founder’s imagination. Then it flows from imagination through the product and into the hands of a customer.
This makes the sole purpose of a product is to conduct value from the founder’s imagination to a customer.
How do you build a valuable imagination?
Since startups are built off insights that capitalize upon market inefficiencies, the non-technical founder’s first role is to go deep into validating the insight.
A non-technical can either whip together a scrappy way to test demand (such as a fake landing page) or become a full-time researcher on target users.
For consumer products: Lurk in the same communities/subreddits and consume the same short-form content your degenerate users watch.
For enterprise products: Fire off a billion cold DMs, churn through your Linkedin network, and as many users interviews as possible.
After the insight feels right, design should be a collaboration between what the market demands and what is technically possible. Every product has different quirks, but the same structural principles apply: make the product easy to understand.
When executing the engineering of the product, the non-technical founder’s entire job is to empower your engineer to cook, no matter how unsexy the responsibilities are.
The non-technical founder should empower the engineer with the necessary bandwidth and focus to deliver great work. It requires a humility that comes from knowing the engineer’s execution speed is by far the most important priority.
It doesn’t matter if it’s being a guinea pig for the app’s beta, creating frontend components through Cursor, redesigning the entire onboarding flow for the 8th time, or giving the CTO a relaxing shoulder massage.
Obviously, this does not completely disqualify the engineer from user interaction or design, but rather encourages more depth from both founders in their respective focus areas.
Ideally, the non-technical founder can also be useful to the codebase.
Scaling products
The 0 → 1 phase attempts to answer “Will this thing actually work?”
Once evidence suggests that there is actual value, the team enters 1 → 2. The focus shifts away from product-building towards distribution.
To distribute a valuable product, we can broadly simplify the process into 3 steps.
Understand which channels your customers live in.
Craft narratives around your product’s value.
Share and scale these narratives.
Distribution is the art of manipulating attention in productive ways.
It is about capturing, maintaining, and converting engagement into a business metric, primarily in growth or revenue.
The channel is entirely dependent on the industry. For consumer products, it might be short-form video. For enterprises, it could be cold email or founder-led sales.
Ultimately, the best distribution is a product so useful or interesting that a user organically advocates for you.
Narratives allow companies to capitalize off an intrinsic human interest in stories. We want to invest our emotions into journeys. Does your story make someone dream of a new world that can only be made possible with your product?
If the answer is yes, then you can capture attention.
Why Product Comes BEFORE Distribution: Mini-Rant
I don’t buy into the chatter of how distribution is the new moat. The most important business metric by far is retention. No amount of distribution will ever make up for a leaky bucket if you are attempting to build a generational business.
Products are almost completely responsible for retention.
The nuance is if you’re building a lifestyle business with the sole goal to print money (ex: Consumer AI apps), distribution can absolutely substitute for product quality.
Funnily enough, within distribution, I think the job of a non-technical founder flips to the opposite of the last stage.
Make your engineer’s life as difficult as possible.
Your engineer is already likely working overtime to ship feature requests, squash bugs, and keep your infrastructure together.
As soon as it is apparent that a real need is being met, the non-technical founder should throw even more gasoline in the fire. By now, the non-technical founder should know exactly where the “well” of users are and how to reach them.
This phase demands an explore-exploit mentality:
Explore: Rapidly test every plausibly relevant channel.
Exploit: Double down on whatever works.
Extreme sales/marketing drive the bulk of outputs in the exploit-phase, but the part that people often overlook is the importance of data.
Data allows you to tactically play an optimization game. By collecting information on user demographics, behavioral patterns, dropoff points, and conversion flows, teams can continuously sharpen the inputs that work.
Much like the product-building phase, success ultimately comes down to one core principle: understand your users and their behaviors thoroughly.
Structuring operations
When a product truly begins to scale, internal chaos explore.
Operations is all about structuring complexity to support business growth. It requires a hyperawareness of processes to ultimately enforce alignment and clarity when everybody reaches their maximum bandwidth.
I’d imagine operations look something like this:
Implement structure into existing business processes.
Scale cash thoughtfully (hiring/fundraising)
Create an environment that enables great work.
Great operations requires context and knowing how each piece of the business affects each other if altered. Non-technical founders are uniquely empowered by the fact that they were there since Day 0.
Because they understand every single product decision, growth hack, and organizational decision ever made, founders are usually in the best position to create an effective company architecture. This mostly means ruthlessly removing bullshit to enable people to do great work.
When it comes down to hiring and fundraising, a non-technical founder’s character and personality will actually provide the most alpha. These two activities both require the ability to convince someone to sacrifice something (either time or money) because they believe in you.
This requires an unmistakable conviction and charisma. Steve Jobs did it so well that people called it a reality distortion field. No glaze.
It’s easy to become lost in vanity metrics like # of employees or $ of VC dollars raised (*cough*). It takes some time in startup world to realize that high numbers aren’t always a flex. The noise of success often distracts from refining the product or distribution in the highest-leverage way.
Summary
Let’s quickly review the core skills in each stage and distill them into takeaways.
Creating a Product
Sociologist – Understanding users deeply
You observe behavior, decode subcultures, and identify patterns. This is the user-research phase: go where your users live, feel what they feel.Designer – Crafting elegant user experiences
You shape the interface between the product and the person. Not necessarily Figma-level design, but system-level UX and human intuition.
Scaling a Product
Influencer – Owning distribution and narrative
You manipulate attention, spread the vision, and turn your product into a story people want to follow, try, and share.
Operations
Interior Designer – Creating a culture of excellence
You set the tone. You shape rituals, communication norms, and team expectations. The "vibe" is your medium.Plumber – Structuring processes and internal systems
You’re in the pipes—setting up Notion, fixing onboarding flows, hacking together ops. You also take out the shit.Missionary – Channeling belief and attracting others
You embody conviction. You rally investors, team members, and users with faith that this thing needs to exist in the world.
Good luck!
Twitter: https://x.com/guo_dini
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinbguo/
this is an awesome read :)
something ive learned a lot recently
Great read.