Non-technical founder that found a cofounder on Reddit.
Story
1. 22 year old college drop out. Wanted to launch an app. Learned that in order to find a tech co-founder, I had to do as much work as possible on my own.
2. I did as much as I could as a non-tech. Wireframed the app, built UI, developed business mode, got an internship within the industry, etc.
3. First app idea (mine) didn't work because it was a B2C webapp that really should have been a mobile app, before smart phones were prevalent. Also, I didn't understand marketing (yet).
4. We pivoted to another idea (his). B2B product. Cold called my way to $6,000 MRR.
5. Hit tech scaling issues, couldn't sell and generate new revenue when we couldn't handle our existing customer workload
6. We eventually split.
Because we had no shared history / adversity, when things got hard, it broke down pretty quick.
Anyways, these failures were enough to land a position as employee #8 at a B2B SaaS that would bootstrap to 200 employees in 4 years.
The CEO liked the hustle and saw past the failures. I was his special projects guy for the first year, and then the remaining 3 years I owned our most complex partnerships (F100). Basically, I was an individual contributor with the blessings of the CEO to align our entire company (product, biz dev, legal, sales, support, marketing, and solutions engineering) to execute on these partnerships. Everyone in the org I depended on to execute did not report to me (IC), so I had to get good at getting people who didn't work for me - to work for me. Also, when they were busy it was often times easier to just jump in and do support, legal, product, etc.
At the time I was 26, all my peers were 20 years older than me at the top of their game, and I was able to learn from them and work at a scale that I would never achieved on my own.
Side note - this company was recently acquired and my options paid out. They were 10 year options, 6 months away from expiration. I didn't get FU money, but it was really cool to see a years salary show up in my bank account 5 years after I left. When I create an ESOP for my team, it will likely be 10 year options too.
Anyways, when I left this company 5 years ago I decided that while the skills and experience I had accumulated were significant, 'enterprise biz dev' wasn't very useful to me as a founder - because I didn't know how to build an enterprise product, support team, legal team, etc.
So I took a huge paycut (below poverty line for my city) to work at a local marketing agency in a sales role, assuming that in order to sell marketing services, I had to know how to do marketing. I didn't know marketing at the time, so that means I would have to learn.
Well, it worked.
Since then, I've
1. Founded my own marketing agency and hit $1m in year 3
2. Launched a B2B SaaS with 3,000 signups including some awesome brands like Fiverr, Thinkific and Mayo Clinic, 400+ paid customers and $100k in revenue in the first ~12 months
Just launched a private beta for a 2nd B2B SaaS and have generated $13k in annual subscriptions pre-launch. Hoping it's successful enough to focus on full-time, but we'll see.
It doesn't really matter if your startup doesn't work if you learn the skills and build the relationships to do something even higher impact next.
Careers are measured in decades, not months or years.
/rambles.