I would make it clear for other founders that their role in the pre-product startup is to 1) continuously (daily) interview potential customers BEFORE the MVP

I would make it clear for other founders that their role in the pre-product startup is to 1) continuously (daily) interview potential customers BEFORE the MVP is ready (and document their findings) so that you as a team have clear understanding what customers actually need 2) ensure enough financing that the product and team can be build 3) help you in recruiting more developers Understanding customers I once did a startup in a similar setup (2 non-technical founders, me as a single technical founder) and the biggest mistake was 2 non-technical founders were waiting for MVP to be ready before they really started to approach customers. I tried to push them to do more customer interviews, but they looked it purely from sales perspective and thought we didn't yet have anything to sell. We effectively build the wrong thing that nobody wanted and they started to lose interest when they realized that the MVP doesn't sell on it's own without significant iteration. Hiring Also, although building MVP quickly is an important step so that you can start to collect better customer feedback in a search for product-market fit, remember that building a team is as critical. Even if you don't have money to hire engineers at this point, you need to start to build hiring pipeline early. It is very hard as a single developer to effectively take care of both bug fixing, devops and new feature development when you start to get customers.