Decision skill · FreeProduct Loop

Do you need a technical co-founder?

Do you need a technical co-founder — or a different way to get the product built?

Version 1.0 · Plain text · No email required · CC BY-SA 4.0

What this skill does

Hand this file to Claude or ChatGPT. The assistant interviews you, one question at a time, through this decision's determining questions — on your specifics. It then applies the decision rules to your answers and gives you the recommendation plainly, with the conditions under which it would change.

The decision it executes

Do you need a technical co-founder? →

What a technical co-founder is actually for, the situations where the search costs more than it returns, and the questions that test a candidate better than any coding trivia.

The guide is the canonical version: determining questions, paths with dated costs, what I'd do, and limits. It belongs to The Product Loop.

Escalation clause

An honest tool knows its edges.

This decision stops being self-serve — and needs a human with scars in the room — when:

Deep tech where the technology is the company — the ownership question needs specialist judgment from day one, not a walkthrough.
A candidate is already effectively aboard — the question is terms (equity split, vesting, roles), and that negotiation deserves experienced human help before anything is promised.
Equity is already in dispute with someone who has been contributing informally — this compounds badly and needs proper agreements before any other decision.
Investors in the founder's niche verifiably treat solo founders as a hard no — the search becomes partly a fundraising requirement and the trade-offs shift.

When this skill revises

Optional. The download never depends on it.

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