Programmers are stubborn and picky. Yeah, these guys are smart and they know it, so it may take a while to persuade a programmer to join your company. If you are not a programmer it becomes even more difficult to recruit coders for your startup. As said above, programmers are quite difficult to deal with when it comes to communication. If you can’t write code, you are automatically excluded from the premier league, and an experienced programmer will talk to you like parents talk to their little kids. Even having 10 minutes of programmer’s time may be a problem, say apart of a job interview.

Yes, programmers do not like you unless you are one of their pack. You are going to have to live with it. However, it is not impossible to hire coders for a non tech startup or the startup in which founders and co-founders are not IT-savvy folks. Here are a few practical tips to help the situation.

Cold email and meeting a bunch of random people isn’t the best way to handle it. So, let’s get the party started.

Relationships Matter

Would you trust someone who randomly e-mailed you out of the blue and asked you to devote a large amount of your time to helping them? Of course not.

Here’s a situation. You get an email from a strange dude asking you to start working on a weird startup. Would you trust him? Probably, you won’t. Why do you think a programmer is different?

Don’t be lazy. Go out and build relationships with the community. There are plenty of sites like meetup.com or linkedin where you can find programming groups. You will have to learn something about programming though, unless you want to look like noob. No hurry here. Do not put too much pressure on people. Do not yell right away that you need a programmer who will be a startup co-founder. Ideally, you should ask a friend to become a co-founder. So, make friends with a coder.

Although this tip sounds pretty stupid (as it’s obvious), people tend to ignore it. Spamming folks with offers and asking every second programmer to become a startup co-founder is a path to nowhere.

Value Proposition of Your Product

OK, it’s not a secret you can’t write a single line of code unless it’s Hello, World! Do not pretend you can, otherwise you’ll be a laughing stock. Instead, spend some time explaining value proposition of your startup. Programmers are good at writing code, so you have to show them you are good at something else.

If there’s one thing that authoritative start-up literature (like The Lean Startup by Eric Reis) has made clear, it’s that just being able to code something is practically worthless. Rather, what’s important is figuring out 1) what people want to buy, and 2) figuring out how to sell it to them. These 2 tasks much easier said than done.

Basically, you have to be damn good at explaining:

• why your startup is different from a myriad of others

• show proofs of successful projects that you have led

• how you are going to earn money and make everyone rich (including a soon-to-be cofounder)

The worst mistake to make is to make programmers believe you are one of those Silicon Valley dreamers who get some financing for a crazy project that will never see its big time.

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