@lo1337 So far these choices have not worked for me:
- close childhood friend (we're still friends though)
- contracting client who proposed a startup idea
These were separate startups but neither really worked out well (although one is still going and I now am the sole owner -- that has been fine and I am going to scale it up once I step back from contracting work). I'm the technical cofounder.
In your situation, you have two problems in my eyes:
- targetting education space which often doesn't have money or to get the money requires expensive sales process based on relationships that makes breaking in as a startup difficult
- non-technical cofounder -- ideas are easy, implementation is difficult, what do you bring?
You should learn how to program and try doing a basic pass on it so you start to get some idea of what is involved. Say it takes N time to decide on how something should work in your project. It is going to take about 10-20N to actually implement it. Along the way, if your process to determine what is being implemented is sketchy, it'll increase that multiple as things are changed. You can do it faster but it'll create technical debt which will slow you down later (sometimes a necessary trade off).
How far can you get without a technical cofounder? Try to go that far. There are an awful lot of non-programmer dev tools these days. If you can mock together what you want to make and then show it to a potential customer and get feedback you're getting somewhere... You might find that what you want to make doesn't have product market fit before you start put time into actually developing the product you would ship.
Oh, and if you try the "how far can you go without a programmer" consider this:
- don't worry at all about logins and parts around the app
- focus solely on the unique value you would be creating and have it demoable on the screen
- it doesn't have to actually work very well -- it just needs to be implemented enough so you can show something you can interact with on the screen -- you can fake out parts of the process (which happens anyway in demos, right?)
Then you can sit meet with potential customers and get feedback. Record the sessions so you can share with later potential technical cofounder. More is better -- you want at least a handful of separate meetings. Try to get actual commitments to buy -- can you? If not, why not? It's difficult for something that doesn't exist but people are notorious for saying they want something and then when the time comes to actually pay for it, it turns out they aren't the ones that can make that decision or some other aspect of the sales process makes the whole idea non-viable.
You can also split the sales process out from the above and make a marketing site with fake screenshots. Then you can try to actually sell the something that doesn't exist yet and see if you can get any actual interest. Not sure about laws in the UK but obviously don't commit fraud -- you have to have some way of "cooling" the deal as you get close to the sale (perhaps explaining some aspects are still in development and are targeted for some date in the future).
Point is, you really need to try to make sure the idea is viable up front. Most people try to avoid this as it's a lot of work. I did too. As a techie, I like the building process and it's easy to go off and build and then try to sell. But you can save an immense amount of time, effort and money by validating the idea as early as possible. There is much better material about this out there than what I can provide. But this is basically what I've learned so far over being cofounder in a couple of startups (but also working as a technical role in startups for my whole career).
