Over the years I’ve heard and read a lot of advice on how to get a technical co-founder. Having a mostly non-technical background myself, I’ve been facing the issues of having a “great” startup idea without having the technical chops to build it myself.
This is an interesting response to Elizabeth Yin's post on why you can't find a technical co-founder that she wrote on Andrew Chen's blog.
She claimed your best chance was to learn to code and build your MVP on your own: this will not only ensure your MVP will be an MVP but also that you learn from it and in the process be more credible to and respected by your future CTO. Thomas Kjemperud doesn't disagree with the second part but claims there's no need to learn to code to do so: with all the open API's and existing tools out there, you should be able to build something semi-automated without even having to learn to code.
He's got a good point: to get 50 users to really love your service or product, do you really need a completely automated piece of software? Or do you need tools that let you deliver the value prop and makes sure it makes those 50 people happy?
It probably depends but the important thing is that you have to learn from these 50 before you do anything else anyway.