I'm not a founder, only a developer, but non-technical people asked me if I want to be their cofounder.
Most of the time they are teams of a few business people who do marketing and biz-dev.
When they tell me about their idea, I often think that the only bad thing about their idea is the part, where the company has to supply 4 people, where only one of them can build something.
Also they often see a technical cofounder as a work-horse and not a partner...
Almost inevitably, there will be 3-4 people vying for their ideas to be implemented, sometimes conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with what's actually possible technically, and the sole dev guy will end up caught in the middle of all this - not unlike corp work, really. And yeah, they'll almost never see you as an actual CO-founder or equal in any way. I've seen that happen (equality) but more often than not, the situation you described.
If you can't "sell" something until every single pixel is perfect and it scales up to instagram levels on day one and everything else is in place because you "only get one shot at impressing person X (or... first customer)"... you're doing something wrong.
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I'm not a founder, only a developer, but non-technical people asked me if I want to be their cofounder.
Most of the time they are teams of a few business people who do marketing and biz-dev.
When they tell me about their idea, I often think that the only bad thing about their idea is the part, where the company has to supply 4 people, where only one of them can build something.
Also they often see a technical cofounder as a work-horse and not a partner...
Almost inevitably, there will be 3-4 people vying for their ideas to be implemented, sometimes conflicting with each other, sometimes conflicting with what's actually possible technically, and the sole dev guy will end up caught in the middle of all this - not unlike corp work, really. And yeah, they'll almost never see you as an actual CO-founder or equal in any way. I've seen that happen (equality) but more often than not, the situation you described.
If you can't "sell" something until every single pixel is perfect and it scales up to instagram levels on day one and everything else is in place because you "only get one shot at impressing person X (or... first customer)"... you're doing something wrong.