I've been thinking for a while on the best way to bring a web start-up idea to life (or at least to prototype stage) and, being a non-programmer myself, I spent the past couple weeks reading up on a lot of articles, blogs and discussions about finding tech cofounders.<p>Through these, I noticed that most of the non-programming/business/MBA types seem to have the lowest success rate as original founders (unless they already had tech friends/acquaintances) simply because they depend so much on finding a tech cofounder to build it first, and that's assuming they can persuade prospective tech cofounders to drop their own ideas to join theirs.<p>Another common method I heard of was to pay a team of developers to build the idea, but I haven't heard much success stories from these kinds either. There's networking events to match people up as well, but I might be limited to networking events at my university since I'm still a student with little formal experiences; and since it's winter break for us now, I'll have to wait until spring semester for the networking events anyway.<p>Overall, it seems that finding a good tech cofounder can take a good while, if at all. Therefore, I decided to learn coding first to at least build a rough prototype, which I could hopefully use to pitch to prospective cofounders along the way. One reason is so that I could at least be learning and working on something in case I don't find someone until six months later. The second reason is because, since I come from a business and psychology background, I felt that it'd be useful to better understand tech business from the programmers' perspective. And lastly, in some ways, it's also about the credibility of how seriously I want to pursue my idea, because it seems like most of the business types with just ideas but no technical understanding are taken the least seriously.<p>I'm aware that it seems like I'm going the long way (though I actually think I'm taking the short route), but I'm pretty patient when it comes to long-term benefits, I have a strong habit of self-learning things, and I'm pretty confident I have time because I doubt many, if any, competitors could work on this idea since it draws heavily on a field-specific knowledge (psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, etc). Or perhaps most of all, I just plain don't want to let the idea die without it ever being given a chance just because I don't have a tech cofounder yet. (And admittedly, I want to do it because if I start putting time and efforts into it, I have less of a reason to drop it later down the road if I get frustrated.)<p>So what I want to ask is, how successful do you think this route could be for non-programming people? And by success, I’m referring to at least getting the first prototype out and attracting a good tech cofounder.<p>Who else have gone this route and how did turn out for them?<p>(Sorry for the wall of text!)<p>*Correction: maybe it's not right to call myself a complete newbie to programming since I took AP Computer Science (basic Java programming) back in high school and learned some rudimentary HTML and CSS in middle school. So the fact that I have some idea of what to expect probably helps.