When I met my current cofounder he was paying $5,000/month to a dev agency in Eastern Europe that was ripping him off with slow progress, inflated hours, and very poor quality code. Their developer was brand new to the tech stack and made many glaring mistakes. As a non-technical founder he had no way to judge the quality of their work, he was completely at their mercy and they took advantage of him.

I do not know how non-technical cofounders expect to avoid this type of situation.

The skill here though is the general skill of hiring people to do a job you can’t do yourself. This is a very useful life skill. Have you ever hired an electrician or builder? It is like that.

So if you hire a company to build something think of a way to keep them in check. You could hire an independent person to review their work (like hiring a seperate project manager and architect to work with the builder)

Or you learn the trade a bit and ask lots of hard questions. That fly by night outfit would crumble on asking basic questions because they are not cut out for it. Their happy paths is suckers. As a coder I got sucked into cheap labour coders and never again. Too much skummy stuff going on.

For sure. I'm a non-technical startup CEO but did two years of CS in college. Also, my product is on the simple side, from a technical perspective. These two facts have definitely helped as I've overseen dev work and brainstormed new product ideas. If you've never done any coding, it's hard to know what is relatively easy versus relatively hard. I'm still not perfect, but at least I don't make the completely uninformed mistakes that I would make if I'd not done a little 'hello world'-ing of my own.