Non-tech Cofounders – Don’t Hire an Agency

I used to work in a web agency in France. By chance, all my projects were e-commerce startups that outsourced their development and ops to us. One may argue that dev was not a core competency for them, but I personally doubt it. Even with our best effort, we were not as invested as an in-house tech co-founder would have been, not by far.<p>Of course, other reasons prevailed, and anyone who knows French business pecularities would see some more reasons for this state of affairs. For one, most French startups, especially e-commerce, are founded by business school graduates, ex managemant consultants, basically the MBA crowd. They mostly don't want to have a tech co-founder, as tech work is seen as low-status. Some of their failure modes are directly related to this. So is their focus on b2b partnerships and bizdev even for e-commerce.<p>There are, of course, French startups run by tech people, and I know plenty who do well and run circles around direct competitors that fit the above patterns.

I'm technical, I build stuff myself, so take my opinion with a pinch of salt.<p>If you have built a non-technical throw-away prototype (paper, wireframe, ...), at some point you may find your testing is limited. IMO, a technical THROW-AWAY prototype is ok to be outsourced, because it'll take all the short cuts it can, and when you are done testing you want to change at least 50% of it anyway, so throwing away and starting from scratch is the right answer.<p>That said, I don't know if there are any agencies that do this. But you could probably find a freelancer that enjoys this type of work. You definitely need a tech co-founder when you build the real thing, though.

Hey, good post! I'm in total agreement.<p>I am starting a company and was in the same situation as all non-technical founders: hire an agency, give away half the company to a tech co-founder, or learn how to build it myself.<p>I went with the third option. Not only is it extremely gratifying to build it with your own hands, but it means I can make quick decisions and changes on the fly, the only cost is my time, and the vision and execution are 100% aligned!

I just went through this from the agency side, and I totally agree with the author. I think just the list of people that were brought on the project prove the point.<p>All these people were involved: Account director, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Marketing Specialists (3 of them for some reason), Copy writer, Content Strategist, User Experience, Art Director, Technical Manager, Front end developer, Back End developer<p>The agency burned through enough money to hire 4-5 employees for a year. We had a few meetings with the client and 8 people from the agency. The math there is pretty painful for the client. 8 people for an hour (at $165+ each per hour) means that each meeting costs well over $1k.<p>Hire a freelancer (like meeeeeee) or get full time employees. Agencies best serve large companies that can't (or don't want to) maintain design and development teams in house.

Very good points in this article. But the problem is that if you are a non-technical founder without connections you are extremely unlikely to convince anyone very good to join your startup. It's probably better to hire a <i>technical</i> (not design-focused!!) agency and pay a premium as you will get much better and more maintainable code than if you hire a junior-level or just plan mediocre software dev off the street. The trick is identifying the right agency.

In a situation right now where I'm working with 2 co-founders (I'm not one myself, just on the sidelines) and they're bringing in an agency. The agency has offered to work for free, because they see a lot of potential in the project. I still think it's a bit of a mistake, even taking the money aspect out of it. The 'find/iterate' mentality from the article is the primary reason why.

I agree for the most part. The motivations and ethos of startups and agencies / dev shops / et al. are not aligned. Thus you have a huge potential for failure, which I have experienced first hand as an entrepreneur and seen repeated numerous times as an investor.