I have an idea for a huge app. How can I validate my idea and find partners?

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Everything about the basics has been covered in the book The Lean Startup. Basically, you build an MVP, start selling it, then look for funding to scale your business. Nothing much to it, it’s not easy, but it is relatively simple.

What I want to talk about is what happens when you can’t follow the script. By far the most common situation is when the person with the idea cannot or does not want to actually build the MVP. The most common solution the idea guy comes up with is to partner with someone who can build it and give that guy 30% of the business while the idea guy retains 70%.

This is what happened to me. I figured, why not, he says he’ll sell it, I don’t like selling, so this could be a way for both of us to get rich, so why not hold my nose and just get it done for him.

I even moved in with the guy so that we could collaborate every day. I knew what it would take and the probable hangups and I wanted to stack everything in our favor. From previous experiences, I thought the main bottleneck was time spent collaborating, in my last enterprise, the guy just couldn’t find time to work on it.

The main problem I ran into was, being a business guy and not an engineer, he really didn’t know anything about technology products. He was leaning on me way more than someone who owns 70% of the business should have. We argued over everything, I felt his ideas were stupid, and he was constantly mis-underestimating everything. I guess he felt his main job was to keep me motivated.

What I learned out of this experience is that any prospective enterprise has a Zero To One Phase. Someone has to drive the product from nothing to something that can be sold. An idea for a huge app puts you at precisely Zero. Whoever can get that idea from Zero to self-sustaining deserves 100% of the company, to be parceled out to collaborators as he sees fit. It is a dictatorship and not a democracy.

When I had this realization, I decided that having a job wasn’t so bad, and so I went out and got one. My former partner learned the hard lesson that he has to actually compete for my time with companies ready and willing to pay me $100k+ a year for my talents, not just fill my head with visions of riches. I’m already rich. You need to make me richer and not poorer if you want to make use of my skills.

It took him over a year, but he finally came to realize that he needs to learn how to code so that he can make his own product or prototype and get funding. It isn’t so much the skills that’s the problem, it’s the mindset differences. As he learns how to code his mindset drifts away from the “I just want someone else to make me rich” frame and more towards the “I’m a craftsman who knows all aspects of my creations” frame. That’s the guy I want to start a business with.

So the first and most important thing you need to do to both validate your app and find collaborators is to learn to code. If you already know how to code, then just start building the app. Show it to other people and see if they want to help. Don’t look to just hand your idea to someone else to build. You are building it.

If you have a ton of money burning a hole in your pocket and don’t want to code and you really want to own your own tech-enabled business, then you need to hire a consulting company like the one I work for to make it reality. I’ve known guys that tried to hire their way to a working business and I’ve never seen it work. Consulting companies can bring a lot of resources to bear on a project, way more than you’ll ever be able to do, and so they’ll be able to hit deadlines and deliver results. You, who thinks of yourself as too good to code, will be able to do none of these things.