How to Find a Technical Cofounder (and Whether You Need One)
How to find a technical cofounder, and how to know whether you actually need one. A non-technical founder's framework for getting technical leadership.
App development process: a guide for the founder paying the bill
The app development process is sold as six neat stages. Here's what actually happens in each, your one job at every step, and where founders quietly lose control…
Software documentation: what to demand from your dev team
Software documentation is the difference between owning your system and renting it from whoever holds the knowledge. What to require, and how to tell if it's any good.
Proof of concept vs prototype: what should you build first?
Proof of concept vs prototype: a POC proves it can be built, a prototype proves it feels right. Which one a non-technical founder should pay for first.
Software architecture: a guide for the founder paying the bill
Software architecture is the set of decisions that price every future change. The guide for the founder who signs the check and can't read the code.
Software development estimation: how to read the number
Your developer sent back a number: 12 weeks, $180,000. An estimate is a range someone rounded off for you. Here are the four questions that pull the range…
Vendor lock-in: what it costs and when to accept it
Lock-in is not a defect in bad tools. It is the price of any tool that does real work for you. A four-question test for pricing the cost…
Functional and non-functional requirements: a guide for the founder paying the bill
Every founder writes the functional requirements. Almost none write the non-functional ones, and those are what decide the price of the build and what happens on launch day.
Story points, explained for the founder paying the bill
What story points actually measure, why nobody will convert them into hours for you, and the one conversion you can run yourself without corrupting the estimate.
Frontend and backend: the non-technical founder’s guide
Frontend and backend explained for the non-technical founder: how to brief precisely, read an estimate, and tell whether a bug is front or back.