I am a solo non-technical founder for a software product and I want to take it to the next level. I have 1 programmer with me. What advice would you give to other non-technical founders before scaling their software product development?

First, you should ask some questions: Should I really scale my software product development ? What makes you decide that ? Is it the right time to scale ? It can be a necessity from a business point of view, and scaling your software product development could be done easily but from a technical view the question you should ask yourself is:  How to manage that later (which is the difficult part).Here are some reflections - Scaling development involves: More people working on the same code: do you have any version control tool and the other collaboration tools (like wikis, messaging, calendars ..etc). Many Free and Open Source Software could be used here, you can also pay for PaaS solutions. More code to test: How your team test code (only unit testing?). What are the strategies for software quality assurance in your startup ? When scaling development teams and software, having a QA team would be a good idea. More code to build and deploy : Who will be responsible for this ? Developers ? Do you have system engineers ? They are more competent for frequent deployments. Whether you have a cloud infrastructure or you are migrating from on premises infrastructure to your cloud infrastructure. You will need both system engineering and DevOps skills to automate builds, deployments and monitoring while keeping your production stable. More bugs: More code means more bugs and bugs in production environments, no matter what infrastructure you're running, has a http://blog.celerity.com/the-true-cost-of-a-software-bug. You will need people working on the availability of your infrastructure and software (especially if you're developing a SaaS), you will need problem solvers. Developers could fix bugs on the development environment but you will need problems solvers on the production environments, better than this you should test before you deploy (this is a http://www.guru99.com/types-of-software-testing.html where you can choose what to test in function of your product). To avoid bugs you should have at least similar development, staging and production environments. http://systemsemantics.com/?p=155 Scaling development means a lots of other things : more applications, software components, may be APIs, databases and a real software factory .. To summarize, handling scalability and growth from a technical view is about: The right people with the right skills The right tools and technologies (infrastructure, collaboration tools, source control, packaging, deployments, automation, bug control ..etc) The right frameworks (lean, fail fast, ITIL), methodologies (scrum,xp) and philosophies (devops). I am actually writing a book (http://bitly.com/1ZJcry1) where I am talking about all of this and more from a conceptual, functional and technical point of view.

Go find meetups in the technology field on which your startup relies and either buy people drinks or sponsor the beer/pizza. You will find it easy to get to know people and the outlay will be a few hundred dollars. Remember there are usually multiple sides to an issue and often more than one way to solve technical issues. Unit testing is useful but not a panacea. Agile software practices are useful but people were doing iterative development years before "Agile" was invented. Sometimes the people you talk to are too young to know things like this - it's possible to be a very good professional with a few years' experience and not know the technologies or practices that precede what you've learned. Be realistic about your financial models and the need to scale. You say you are non-technical but are you non-technical to the point of being unable to have a proper spreadsheet modelling your business growth? If so, get someone to help with that. It is very easy to fall in with talk of the need to scale but it has its dangers: Spending a lot of time designing things to be scalable slows you down getting to market and you may be scaling something that customers don't want. If you commit to paying for resources to support scaling, that's a cost structure that can sink you. Yes sometimes things look cheaper when booked up-front but be realistic about the liability. What are the people costs of scaling? Are you going to be able to handle having 100 users, 1,000, 1 million users? How many of them need some kind of response on Twitter or Facebook or (yikes!) direct support? How are you going to cover those costs?

You need to hire someone who understands you market and who understands software development. A product manager with a background in software development would be ideal. Be prepared to pay a lot in either or both cash and stock to get this person. This is likely to be your most strategic hire, so do not be penny wise and pound foolish.