Funding a startup with an app dev studio as its tech arm

Adam, my personal experience is of a catch 22 in nature in that accelerators and vc today, will not accept you without a technical co founder yet some circumstances such as (geographic location, age, idea maturity etc) make it extremely unlikely that you would find one.

SaveOnDev.com is a company that tries to solve this problem but I will not digress.

From what I can tell investors have 2 main arguments: (1) as you search for a business model you'd need to pivot quickly and often so you need someone sitting across the table from you to react fast with technical modifications (2) the ability to attract a tech co-founder (i.e. get some guy to drop everything and join you) is a natural filter on the idea and on the charisma of the founder.

Whileboth of these arguments carry weight - I believe they reek of herd mentality and are dangerous to the vc industry over the long term.

I observe that most accelerators and vc would want to invest in teams that have something built already and some traction and ideally if you already had an exit before. They want to reduce their risk.

Now, who do you think have something built and some traction and would go to accelerator or vc for 50K? I'd say products that will remain sluggish at best and also want to reduce their risk!.

So it appears to me that the investors themselves are creating a natural filter of their own you see? and a not very good one.

Those arguments also ignore real-world experience because in many investment circumstances vc and accelerators 'play' with other people's money. This bias creates a lot of second order consequences that I may expand upon next time but the idea is that few would look at you for who you are, what have you achieved so far etc. If you don't fit the template that everyone is using - they pass. In this respect you'd better off talking to Angels.

I agree with the previous commentators that managing the project professionally (i.e. knowing what you doing) and keeping ownership of the code and making sure it is written in a way you could take it in house is crucial. However, all this would not solve the funding problem.

the benefits of using a dev studio is that you have access to all the skills set you need; If you choose the right one, they would never leave you behind enemy lines for other customers; some of them can also add value on business model customer development and they can write code faster than a single co founder programmer could. oh, and cost less!