Congrats! You’ve failed your first startup. I’m being COMPLETELY serious when I say congrats! This is a great opportunity. It took me 3 failed startups to learn this lesson.

Us technical co-founders have a hard time knowing who to partner with. We must be involved in business operations and know how to speak the language.

I would suggest reading The Lean Product Playbook. I also like some of Paul Singh’s advice.

Business co-founders should be able to prove there is a market before developing any sort of solution.

How did Mint do it? They created a blog about personal finance. That turned into a lot of followers, which they later converted into users. Paul Singh says you need an email list (aka people to contact that are at least somewhat interested in a solution to the problem). This is true for any stage company: from a sole proprietor to Fortune 100.

The downside? If the market is proven, it lessens your value. You can combat this by learning how to find product-market-fit, advertising and generally getting some knowledge about the topics us technical co-founders try to avoid.