What Your Technical Cofounder Isn't Telling You

Here are a few whoppers that I've overheard other technical cofounders telling their non-technical cofounder:

We need to have our own servers.

Call me maybe. Right now it's really inexpensive to start on cloud platforms like Amazon AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace and a host of other cloud platforms. Self-hosting means your dev team / cofounder will be spending a chunk of time managing hardware instead of building new features.

The cloud is too expensive

This might be true for your startup. You might be the color of unicorn that happens to have a couple $50,000 servers laying around and just needs a data center.

But development time costs $1-$2/minute. Amazon's biggest, baddest instance costs around $5.50 per hour (it's a lot less if you commit to a [reserved instance])(http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/purchasing-options/reserved-instances/).

We should build on iOS only.

iOS is awesome. But it's like only selling to people who buy luxury cars. That's 11% of the market. Yes, there's more money there, but the rest of the market behaves differently. Usually the motivation for not wanting to go to market on other platforms is simple: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

X is Awesome and Everything Else Terminally Sucks

This really means, I only know X, and I'm unwilling to learn anything else. Get a new cofounder, or you'll end up doing so later on when you have to migrate off X.

Simplicity is hard because complexity happens.