Opinions on founding a startup without the skills to implement it myself?
I have a business idea that is outside of my field of expertise. It involves creating a website/app that has people log in using their Facebook accounts. I know what I want – I know how I want it to look, what the features will be, what rules I’ll have in place between users, what text the website has etc. But I don’t have technical knowledge to create that website, implement the Facebook API into it, create a user account database and the system that will manage user data and all that. It'll be a platform that piggy-backs on Facebook's users.
While I am an advanced computer user, I am not a coder, I’ve never created more than a basic web page, I don’t know any programming languages (Java/HTML/etc). I’ve looked into what it would take to learn the skills to create this on my own, and the optimistic view is 6-9 months to have the right skill set. But the project is too large for one person to do at an acceptable speed, even if they have all the skills. And there’s something to be said for striking quickly, as one can never know how long the golden age of internet startups will last, or if someone else will try the idea out themselves.
So what I’m thinking about is trying to get this idea off the ground while delegating the implementation of that idea to others. Basically, I’m stuck as just being the “guy with the vision,” and I’m concerned about keeping a majority of the control over that vision while in a role where I implement practically none of it.
What do you think? Is what I’m saying a red flag? Am I going to be in over my head here? If anyone has done something similar -being the “vision guy” but not being in charge of implementation- I’d love to know how that went. I’m afraid that if I pitch it to others and let them take charge as the lead I’ll lose control of the idea and it’ll spiral out into something I didn’t intend. I want to keep firm control over it, and given that it has the potential to be controversial it’s important that I be able to overrule people if they push it too far. Yet, I’ll inevitably have to offer equity in the company to incentivize people to join the endeavor.
It seems there have been multiple internet startups involving “idea guys” who were eventually kicked out of the company once the company found success, or had their idea taken and implemented by the people they pitched it to. I’d like to avoid that…
Posted Jul 31, 2015, 11:44 PM UTC