Right. It is pretty difficult to run a web startup alone. Especially in the early days of excitement and terror. You need shoulders on your side to bear part of the pain. And the thrill.
But do your founders need to be hackers, or even 'tech'? Especially if your product is not new technology per-se, but solves users' problems using a combinatoric of available technology.
Does the skill to write this product necessarily need to be with a founder?
Gut and heart say that your CTO needs to be a founder. The mind does not find impeccable logic for it.
No. There are lots of startups with non technical founders who can bring in (or outsource) the technical development. There is a larger risk in the quality of the code when you do this. If there is no tech founder, then most of the time you will have a harder time judging the developers you will be using (hiring/outsourcing to.) It also means that you will have to pay for the development vs a co-founder putting in sweat equity to get the product done.<p>Based on your brief description, it sounds like there will not be a lot of heavy lifting to get the application up and running. From personal experience, getting the MVP version of the app done is really the easy part. It doesn't always feel like it, but in the overall picture it is easier to do development than it is to sell the app once finished. The sales/marketing after the fact is where the real work starts. Many hackers have trouble moving from development to marketing.
A lot of it is risk management as well as budget control. Without a 'tech' co-founder you don't know if you're getting taken to the cleaners or if your "not new technology per-se" technology as "bolted together" for your particular needs is going to do the job.<p>If you're not technical, how can you even know how hard or tricky the needed work is?