I am largely techie guy. In the sense, I can rarely understand what it is to be a non-technical person. Let me explain that a bit. I cannot fathom why some people cannot see how a certain idea or logic could be written as software. While here I am, trying to see the world around me as though someone wrote down code to make it work the way it does. I guess people are just wired differently. I have more recently come to terms with this fact and that some people are just better at other things than visualizing software. Its perhaps the same way that some people are visually challenged or aurally challenged (is that correct?). And I continue to remain indifferent to this difference.

But more recently, I began coming across people with far more brilliant startup ideas in completely non-technical domains that does end up needing a little bit of software here and there. For instance, in my opinion, an ecommerce app/platform is a lot more than the shiny website or app. Its a largely supply chain management problem, a payment management problem and a CRM problem than a software problem. And there are tonnes of positions like these where software is a mere enabler and a small portion of the idea that they are working on. And more often than not, most of these founders are completely non-technical. Sometimes to the extent of not being able to choose the right team to help them build this small piece of software that’s largely necessary evil in their mind.

So how does this work? Like I said a whole lot of them burn their fingers with the wrong teams. Some of them outsource and get it done at quite a high price. What do the others do? Do they just keep paper trails of the work the software should do? How do they find outsourcing partners? How do they evaluate them? Where do they find the partners from? More importantly, how does this work in India? I know a lot of companies in India that bag outsourcing contracts from funded startups elsewhere. But what about startups in India? Please point me to some references.