A non-tech co-founder can bring value in two ways; their social networks and deep market domain knowledge.
Finding a good niche and refining a concept to find market fit isn't easy. As a tech guy, it's often not clear where the business value is.
I recently implemented a feature for which I didn't see the full value initially. Once it was done, my co-founder said something like "This feature will make our target audience's eyes pop out of their heads." I can actually see it now but it wasn't clear to me before, yet it was always crystal clear to him as he himself fits within the target market.
Anyway we'll see where this goes, there are a lot of factors at play but in any case, it's nice to have that degree of certainty that yes, we're addressing a genuine need.
If your co-founder isn't within the target market then you're basically just guessing what users want and that's a bad approach.
Sometimes it's more complicated than that though, and that's when you need social networks. For exampls, I've built solutions in pure tech (dev tools) but it's very different. Dev tools is a weird market because it's heavily monopolized by big tech and the target audience (developers) have little say over what tools they get to use on the job. So the fact that I'm in the target market doesn't actually add much value there. Even if the target audience loves something, it doesn't necessarily translate to sales. You have to have experience with developer tools from both a corporate and non-corporate perspective to understand that.
Finding a good niche and refining a concept to find market fit isn't easy. As a tech guy, it's often not clear where the business value is.
I recently implemented a feature for which I didn't see the full value initially. Once it was done, my co-founder said something like "This feature will make our target audience's eyes pop out of their heads." I can actually see it now but it wasn't clear to me before, yet it was always crystal clear to him as he himself fits within the target market.
Anyway we'll see where this goes, there are a lot of factors at play but in any case, it's nice to have that degree of certainty that yes, we're addressing a genuine need.
If your co-founder isn't within the target market then you're basically just guessing what users want and that's a bad approach.
Sometimes it's more complicated than that though, and that's when you need social networks. For exampls, I've built solutions in pure tech (dev tools) but it's very different. Dev tools is a weird market because it's heavily monopolized by big tech and the target audience (developers) have little say over what tools they get to use on the job. So the fact that I'm in the target market doesn't actually add much value there. Even if the target audience loves something, it doesn't necessarily translate to sales. You have to have experience with developer tools from both a corporate and non-corporate perspective to understand that.