The stereotypical startup has two founders—a product-driven visionary who can sell the dream and a technical strategist who can build it.

But startups are never stereotypical. They are each unique. One common type is the startup that paves its own path without a technical founder. Many founders have good ideas and market insights but don't know the right technical partners. So, they start without a CTO.

There are plenty of reasons why having a technical founder creates an advantage, but I would like to focus on what we can do in case we don't have a techie in our corner.

Startups without technical founder often outsource their software development to agencies. Or maybe they have a developer on payroll who has the tech chops but lacks the leadership skills. That's a good way to get that first version of the product in the hands of customers. But it comes with some risks.

Here are the three most common risks of growing a startup without a CTO or technical leader and how to detect and avoid them.

Overcomplex architecture

Engineers love to build scalable solutions, but scale comes at a price. In the startup phase, you don't need to build something that scales to a million users. You need something that can quickly adapt to the market. That requires an architecture that is as simple as possible.

Make sure that whoever builds your product for you keeps it simple. That means a single deployable unit and a single database. Be extra careful when your tech vendor starts pitching microservices or event-driven architecture at this point. If they do, they need to give you a good reason. If that reason is "scalability", walk away.

Simple is faster, cheaper, and more flexible when adapting. That's what the first version of your product should be.

Complicated infrastructure

The same principle can be extended to infrastructure. Keep it simple. A Platform-as-a-Service solution like Laravel Cloud or a single server on Digital Ocean is a great start. You want your engineers to focus on building features, not on setting up ever more elaborate infrastructure.

It's unfortunately very common to see startups waste their very limited resources on Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code in the hope of future-proofing the product.

That's the wrong way to look at it. Outgrowing your infrastructure is the best-case scenario! Having too much traffic is a luxury problem. Startups never die because they can't handle too many users. They die because they spend their limited resources on the wrong stuff.

Make sure your software vendor picks a PaaS or a simple server setup.

Involve the engineers in the solution design

Another common mistake for non-technical founders is relying heavily on specifications and requirements documents. They feel they can avoid building the wrong thing by going into great detail on what the developers should build. Unfortunately, this is counterproductive. Without the necessary technical insights, it's very easy to miss impactful edge cases and side effects that will come back to bite you later.

A far more productive approach is to spell out the problem you're trying to solve and let your developers pitch their solution to you. That way, you can verify if they understand the problem before the first line of code is written. Breaking up your products into problem/solution pitches is a good way to leverage your developer's knowledge without falling into the specification trap.

Involve your engineers early in the solution design. Once your developers get into the habit of presenting early demos and prototypes, you can be confident they understand what needs to be built.

Going ahead without a technical founder can pose a few problems, but nothing insurmountable if you mitigate the risks above. At a certain point, as the market picks up what you're putting down, you'll need to hire a technical leader. This can be full-time or a fractional CTO. You could even give your current developer a little help in growing those leadership skills.

But until that day comes, keep it simple and involve the engineers in solution design. That's the best way to launch your new startup without a tech leader in your corner.