I will not promote - Should we raise and hire or keep bootstrapping and look for another technical cofounder?

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My cofounder and I are bootstrapping a SaaS in a niche US healthcare space. This space had two competitors until the big guy bought and discontinued the little guy. Now the big guy has a monopoly and everyone hates their product. (It hasn't changed much since the early 2000s). I'm technical. My cofounder is not. We both realize the incredible opportunity in front of us. We have talked to dozens of high value customers, all begging us to build a better product. I've actually been doing that for about two years now whilst living off savings. The challenge is that it's a big undertaking. Customers won't pay for the product unless it does all the stuff they need which includes medical billing, Medicare compliant documentation, patient scheduling, ICD-10 codes, CPT codes, progress reports, e-signatures, admissions, discharges, integration with third party software, HIPAA compliance, time sheets, etc. My cofounder and I are fortunate to have enough savings to comfortably build this business without revenue for a while, but it's becoming clear that we could really use another developer and we don't really want to pay a dev salary. Now we face a choice - raise and hire or find a third cofounder. I've always said we'd be better off finding a third cofounder who's willing to bootstrap with us. We could pay them a small stipend so they can eat and pay rent, but not much else. I like this approach because it's highly motivating. When you're income is directly tied to the success of your business, you feel the pressure to make it work and you feel the excitement of potentially striking it rich. When you collect a paycheck, you just don't have the same incentive to work on Saturday, fix that pesky bug, answer that email quickly, and focus your attention on problems that matter. So, I've been trying to find someone to fill this role, but it's proving to be very difficult. Now I'm wondering, would we be better off just raising money and hiring a software engineer the normal way.?   submitted by   /u/neb2357 [link]   [comments]