Founder Stories

Can You Build a Tech Product without a Technical Co-Founder?

• DQventures • Season 1 • Episode 6

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Do you really need a technical co-founder to build a tech business? Toby Scregg doesn't think so.  He’s built a VC back startup, a technology business, invested in tech companies and he's never written a line of code.

In this episode of Founder Stories, James Green talks with Toby, founder of Blue Mongoose, an agency that uses agentic AI development to build software for companies.

Toby is candid about the mistakes: building a team too early, the pull of "just one more feature," the trap of raising VC money when it's the wrong fuel. And he's clear-eyed about what's genuinely changed: why he moved off no-code, what AI coding tools now make possible for non-technical founders, and where he draws the line on what they can't do.

For any experienced professional weighing up the move from a corporate role to starting their own business, this is a conversation with someone whose done it, more than once, about de-risking that decision.  Toby discusses validating cheaply, staying small, selling it yourself, and being honest about how much money you actually need.

DQventures helps experienced professionals de-risk the journey from corporate employee to founder — your 0-to-1 co-founder. If you think you're ready to start your own company, apply at DQventures.com.

Why we record real founder stories

SPEAKER_04

I've never written a line of code in my life. I feel when I'm using Tor code that I'm just managing them an incredible team. I think that skill set is more important than actually needing something hyper-technical at this point.

SPEAKER_03

The line between product and service is merging. That was your insight. Tell me about that.

SPEAKER_04

If we kind of go back to SAS, you raise half a million quid and then you build a product so good that a thousand customers can use the same product because it's so expensive to build your own product that you're kind of willing to use the same product as a thousand other people. I think now the cost of developing software is just going to keep going down, right? Because of that, I see clients are going to get much, much more demanding. Consultancies, they're going to look at this and say, why don't we just build project management tools for our niche industry?

SPEAKER_03

The temptation is always to throw yourself into the product and build and build and build because it's it's fun and it's easy and you're just working with your imagination. It's like drawing pretty pictures. You can lose yourself. But actually, the thing that's going to make your business succeed or fail is can you get any clients?

Toby's background: founder, VC, investor

SPEAKER_04

Don't hire a salesperson to fix a sales problem. If you as a founder can't sell it, you're not doing the right thing. If you can't look a user client in the eyes and get them across the line, the efficiency of each subsequent marginal salesperson, right, is less than you. So that's not the problem, and it's going to be seriously expensive.

SPEAKER_03

Imagine that the overnight Blue Mongo stopped existing and you were going to start again. What would you what would you do? I wouldn't bother to anything that I did now, I would do. Hi, I'm James Green, co-founder of DQ Ventures. If you're an experienced professional thinking about starting your own business, then please listen to this before you quit.

Why he launched Blue Mongoose

SPEAKER_03

Whereas that is just such a tiny percentage of real founders. And you never hear from people who are building real businesses, who are focused on revenue rather than trying to go and raise capital from a VC. And so we want to record real conversations with people who are building the kind of company that you, as a listener, might well be building or might be likely to build, and try and find some of the learnings from those kind of founders that you won't hear on the majority of podcasts. And so today I'm very happy to be joined by a member of our portfolio, Toby Scrigg, who is the founder of Blue Mongoose. Toby has been through a bunch of very different changes because he's right at the forefront of trying to build technology

No-code and building a team too early

SPEAKER_03

for businesses that maybe haven't built technology before or founders that hasn't built technology before. And so he began in the world of no code and has graduated now into very much into AI. And so we're going to talk to Toby not just about what it was like to start a business, but also what it's like to build technology. So welcome, Toby. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. So Toby's quite unique in our in our DQ portfolio because he he had actually been a founder before. It wasn't completely his own business, a bit like a rocket internet where you were piloted, parachuted in as the founder.

SPEAKER_04

Indeed. Yeah. And then I've kind of had a bit of both. So had a kind of rocket internet style experience and then a more kind of traditional B2D backed business as well, where I was one of the founders.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, you've been there and done it. And you and you were a VC for a while as well.

SPEAKER_04

Exactly. So that was in London before

The innovator's dilemma from the inside

SPEAKER_04

any of my kind of entrepreneurial endeavors.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, exactly. Based on all the experience that you'd had, what made you decide to launch Blue Mongoose?

SPEAKER_04

Sure. So when we were building products before I'd even kind of started thinking about Blue Mongoose, me and my co-founder, we both um we weren't technical. And we always felt a bit hamstrung either working with agencies or working with um like trying to hire a CTO, this kind of mythical hire. And it's less the case now, but back then, five, six years ago, um, yeah, building tech was much more difficult, much more expensive. It was always quite annoying, to be honest. I my plan after I kind of moved on from that company was to learn how to do it myself. And no code was the the best option at the time. So bubble, glide, tools like these. I'd always been interested in them, got into that, and then just got excited really about how many people I knew wanted this, and then instead of learning it to do myself, built a team, which was probably a bit too early in the wrong call looking back, but we can get onto that later. We yeah, grew pretty quickly, predominantly building products for people like me, i.e., non-technical co-founders, domain expertise, good idea, et cetera, et cetera, and tried to do a better job than the experiences that I had before, right? Yeah, we kind of grew unevenly mixed success until about 12 people at our peak, which was maybe nine months ago. Yeah, then Claude came code came along and kind of changed absolutely everything. Really, it's really interesting to kind of experience a classic innovators dilemma from the inside, to be honest. And I had a like itchy feeling for a while that something wasn't quite right,

Enjoying the business more now

SPEAKER_04

to be honest, where you're kind of like racing horses while everyone else is mucking around with motorbikes, you know. But it took me a while to make the lead, especially when you have like you're telling clients every day that what you're doing is the right thing, when you have lots of people on the payroll who are very, very good at doing the old things well. But you just got this feeling, and I took myself off and just for a couple of months just got really, really super deep and basically proved to myself what was and wasn't possible,

The mythical CTO and investor pressure

SPEAKER_04

and it just kind of absolutely blew my mind. And then yeah, so we had a pretty tumultuous three, six months where we stopped using bubble, transitioned over to a genetic development, yeah, had big changes in the team because of that. Also stopped working so much with startups and focused on more mature businesses, right? Um and yeah, it's interesting how you described us right at the start where you said that we are building technology for companies that don't have technology, and that's kind of the thread between the startups and the bigger companies that we work with now.

SPEAKER_03

You can have that one for free. Perfect.

SPEAKER_04

And it's kind of what I hoped the no code movement would deliver, to be honest. I've never enjoyed running the business more than I have now.

SPEAKER_03

Well, what do you think is behind that happiness? Is it the fact that you I we've talked about this temporarily, I love that you you now have total control over the quality of the work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_04

It's like that saying where you can't be happier than your unhappiest child. For me, I cannot be happier than my unhappiest client. It's a bit of like a hamstring, if you know what I mean. Like Achilles Heel, sorry. And I just feel like we're doing a much, much, much better job. I see like a clearer path to like a more efficient automated business as well. A big bit of the kind of the unsung benefits

Can you build without a CTO?

SPEAKER_04

of a genetic development, I think, is all of the kind of ancillary things that you can do, the automated QA, the automated product analytics, the automated everything really. I enjoy building like machines, you know, things that work, processes that work much more than I enjoy managing people. Yeah, I think just everyone's happy. Developers don't like to be managed either. So it's just a much, much better fit for what I'm good at.

SPEAKER_03

Okay, let's take a quick break and hear from one of our portfolio companies.

SPEAKER_00

Most bias tech companies focus on the science when they're building a clinical trial. But at the same time, one of the most expensive mistakes you can make is getting patient reality wrong or getting it too late. Hi, I'm Marcello. I'm the founder of Common Sci-NUPs. I worked uh in the healthcare space, uh, pharmaceutical companies, uh, biotechnology companies for the past uh eight years, and focus now on the moment before

Don't spend three months learning to code

SPEAKER_00

key decisions uh get locked in by using uh real-world patient needs, uh real patient language to pressure test hypotheses, to pressure test assumptions about how a disease is actually experienced. If you are a biotech company designing a clinical trial or in the process of shaping your positioning or preparing for uh investors' negotiations, you can find out more at commonsignups.com.

SPEAKER_03

If we go back to the startup days, and I know you've moved on from building for startups, but my experience of uh early stage startup founders, non-technical founders, is that they expect to find a CTO who's gonna jump in unpaid, equity only, join the dream, slightly smaller equity stake, and do a load of work and make everything work, no no mistakes, everything's gonna be perfect for

Why DQ moved from products to services

SPEAKER_03

not that much money or no money. Was that your experience when you're working with startups?

SPEAKER_04

I think to a certain extent, that is amplified by investors as well who kind of require it, like won't look at you if you don't have one, all of this kind of stuff, right? Like in our in our term sheet from our investor, uh, this well-known VC, it was kind of it was a soft condition, right? But we had to go and get one, you know. And it was a major sticking point in every round of follow-up funding with additional investors after that, right? So in this kind of start-up ecosystem, there is this definite belief that it is a hard requirement for sure. Yeah, when you've taken a little bit of VC funding, it's very, very difficult to stop taking it. You know, that's very much like in the psyche of founders to get it. And I think you're right that the perception versus reality of what that person will actually do for how much is quite different.

Product vs service: the merging line

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I mean, I've worked with a few CTOs, and and the first thing they want to do is go and hire some developers because they don't want to do the building themselves. They want to be the mastermind behind the architecture and the strategy. What is the reality now with with the AI tools that you've got? Can a non-technical founder build a technical business without a CTO now? Do you think?

SPEAKER_04

I think it's getting easier and easier. Right. I think the answer in once, two years could very much be different now. I've never written a line of code in my life. If you have experience managing developers, managing designers, managing people from products, managing QAs, managing architects, then I feel when I'm using clawed code that I'm just managing them an incredible team, right? That said, okay, you've got a meeting with the clients, clients, tech team, you know, and you can't claude code your way through that. You just gotta like know it, right? Or you look like an idiot. Yeah, I think broadly though, we are moving towards this kind of democratization of access to technology, right? Um, the no-code promise. It very much depends on the type of business that you're building as well. Like, I wouldn't suggest someone non-technical goes to try to like train their own LLM at this point, this kind of stuff. Like, then again, two, three years ago, I would have said that about SATS product. So who knows where we're gonna be in a couple of years.

SPEAKER_03

Having worked with with hundreds of early or first-time founders, the temptation is always to throw yourself into the product and build and build and build because it's it's fun and it's easy, and you're just working with your imagination. Yeah. Uh it's like drawing pretty pictures. You can lose yourself. But actually, the thing that's gonna make your business succeed or fail is can you get any clients?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So the lot the last thing I'd be advising um professionals who are thinking about starting their company to do would be to take three months off and learn claw code. Through the development of DQ Ventures, when we started this, we thought we were just gonna build tech product companies. That's

The most common pitfalls to avoid

SPEAKER_03

where the money is, that's where the multiples on revenue are and the exits are. Uh, and then we we quickly realized through through some fairly painful lessons that we could we could sell the dream and we could help people raise money for product companies. Investors were back then at least willing to back entrepreneurs with some industry insights and and uh deep expertise that weren't technical. But what we realized was that product companies are actually really difficult to build. And if you don't, if you don't come from that world, then chances are you're not going to succeed. And so we we pivoted somewhat towards businesses that could at least survive on some kind of service and then productize that service later. So add an add a layer of technology once you've got clients, once you're delivering value. Yeah, the line between product and service is is merging. You that was your insight. Well, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_04

If we kind of go back

What he'd do differently

SPEAKER_04

to SaaS, like why SaaS products were so popular, right? It's because, like you say, you raise half a million quid, you build a product, and then you build a product so good that a thousand customers can use the same product, right? And the advantage of that is because it's so expensive to build your own product that you're kind of willing to use the same product as a thousand other people. And that's why SaaS was so popular, right? I think now the cost of developing software is just gonna keep going down, right? Um, it's that democratization point, essentially. And because of that, I see clients are gonna get much, much more demanding. The reason that the Asanas, the Monday.coms, all of these guys' share prices gone through the floor, right? Um, because these generic horizontal project management tools, people are looking at it and it's like, just build that in an afternoon. Where I see that going is that um consultancies, they're gonna look at this and say, hey, we used to do kind of use that Monday.com example, like project management advisory, operationally type stuff.

Why smaller teams lower your risk

SPEAKER_04

Why don't we just build like uh project management tools for our niche industry? And then that's where I see the merging, right? That people are gonna start thinking, okay, I was really good at kind of advising this vertical. Now I can build a product as well. On the other side, if you're a consultancy, if you're an agency, if you don't build some kind of technology, even if it's just internal, but I do think that companies like that are going to start building more products, then you're just gonna fall behind. And so I think we've got forces on both sides that on the product side they need to get more bespoke, they probably need to do more kind of customization and that kind of side, and then on the consultancy side, they need to get more tech and AI enabled, right? And I think the convergence of those two worlds, at least we'll see more overlap. Essentially's not going to become Salesforce overnight, you know. But um, I believe that we will see them doing more of each other's like competence.

SPEAKER_03

You've built tech for us, we we've used your tech internally, you've built tech for our portfolio companies. You've you basically, for in your previous life and in your current life, you've built technology that works and you've also seen technology that doesn't work. What what would you say if you were talking to someone who was out there thinking about building a business, whether it be service with a with a a technical bent or a product that had some consulting in it, as this future seems to seems to suggest, what would you say are the most common pitfalls that people should be looking out for that you've seen?

SPEAKER_04

It's a classic and just almost kind of now incredibly boring to say, but it's still building a product before you've speaking to any customers, right? That still happens. One more feature. Exactly.

The number you actually need

SPEAKER_04

Just one more feature, and I totally get it, see it, and guilty of it, right? I think now if I was pitching to more clients, I would think like, shit, in the time it used to take me to do a pitch deck, I could now just wick up like a pretty epic prototype. Maybe I should just do it now, right? I would now invest a bit more in demonstrating what a solution could look like before I built it.

SPEAKER_03

Then imagine that the overnight blue mongo stopped existing and you were gonna start again. What would you what would you do?

SPEAKER_04

Oh, that's a good question. Take a long time off to start off. I think whenever you mix competency areas, good things happen. I've always been, and we've had tons of conversations about this, but like long-term equity investing um is always super interesting to me. Combining what I understand about technology and AI into that world, I think would be super cool. I wouldn't build a team. I know that. Like uh anything that I

What raising VC really commits you to

SPEAKER_04

did now, I would do by myself.

SPEAKER_03

Um and like a team at all, because you you even now you've got a small team, haven't you?

SPEAKER_04

When things are bad, they're much, much, much worse the bigger the team that you have, right? I would really try and keep things quite tight. So yeah, you just don't have to fire every anyone if you're wrong, right? Yeah, it's bad enough being wrong, it's doubly bad being wrong and having to fire someone that you like, right?

SPEAKER_03

It's funny because we we had um one of our portfolio companies that had a slight cash flow issue due to overexpansion, overextension. Things going really well, but you you'll you'll know this from your your past life that it's cash flow that kills businesses. Yeah. And they had it they had a bit of a cash flow issue and needed some some external support, which they got and everything was fine. But Ollie, my fellow uh co-founder of DQ, he said to them that said you really need to build a buffer for these kind of things because it's okay now, you can go and you can find somebody to help you out. But when you're 10 times the size, that problem isn't only 10 times bigger, it's completely different because you now you need to raise millions of dollars to get you through through this cash flow issue, and maybe there's no one out there willing to give you it, and your business dies completely.

SPEAKER_04

I think it's important to have like a number that you need in life, right? Money. I mean, I realize that 10 million quid does not make me happier than does not make me 10 times happier than a million, you know. Just kind of optimizing what is the like probability-weighted most likely way that I can get to what this number might look like, or 40%, 50% of the way there, whilst not nuking every other aspect of my life, right? I guess I would be less focused on the area that I was going into and more thinking about kind of criteria like that, right? And things like is this gonna take me two, three years to get my first customer? Am I going after massive enterprises with gigantic sales cycles? That would be a hard no for me. Like the reverse of that. Can I kind of build something that there's tons of clients or users that are easy to find that you can reach easily, get feedback from?

SPEAKER_03

That's taking the DQ uh investment thesis and and and then one-upping it big time. Because as you know, the part of the reason we started DQ was we found all these people who were out there thinking they're going to build the next unicorn and they want to raise venture capital. They don't realize what a poison chalice that is. That uh the day that you raise venture capital is the day that you start reporting to someone else, get driven daily, weekly, monthly for to hit your your growth targets, grow no matter what, doesn't matter if you're not sleeping, doesn't matter if you're sleeping in the office, just

Domain expertise and unsolved pain

SPEAKER_03

hit those targets. And I think a lot of people just don't ask themselves, is that is that really the life they want? They just think on, I want all the money that that person gets when they exit. They don't want the 10 years, 15 years of terrible graft in the meantime, ups and downs, thinking you're going out of business, thinking you're gonna lose everything. And so we took, we thought, okay, well, we'll build, we'll help people build profitable businesses. We'll take a stake right at the beginning so that we can we can still make money if we have a $10 million exit. Uh, and those people still gonna make life-changing money. But like you say, do you really need life-changing money if you're doing work you love and enjoying getting up every day?

SPEAKER_04

I think with that kind of VC, right? Like, and I if I was a founder, unless I was kind of like just incredibly mission driven, almost, right? Like, and that kind of that money was like the

Don't build winner-takes-all

SPEAKER_04

Big money basically that's available when you have very, very little traction, which is what those VCs are good at doing. Um yeah, unless you're either mission driven and you kind of need that amount of money to win the market, or just kind of existentially you just want to see your face on the cover of Forbes write that kind of business, right? Like then I would seriously look at other funding routes having like seen the situation from a lot of different sides. And yeah, fair play to people that won that. No issue, fair play for the people writing those checks. But um I think it's important to understand what it is and um yeah, the expectations.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, what the game is. I think a lot of people think that the VC industry exists to support people with good ideas, which it does not. The VC industry exists to bet on the five or ten companies per year that actually changed the face of the planet and make an absolute fortune in doing so. Yeah. And it does not exist to serve anyone outside those.

SPEAKER_04

Where VC came from and where it's been the last 10-15 years is quite different, right? The super, super deep tech, like Silicon Valley, like really, really innovative stuff, and then kind of shifted to just investing in like just another human resource management system or another CRM, right? Basically just funding this SAS boom. And now I do see that the pendulum is kind of moving the other way, that um it's now going back more towards putting a lot of money on a small number of kind of deep tech winners, which makes sense, but is going to be a reduction in the number of funds because of that, basically. I think we'll see less unicorns and more like medium-sized businesses being built, which I think is much healthier and better for founders, better for the economy, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01

One thing we've learned at DQ Ventures is that the best founders never start. Hi, I'm Sam, one of the general partners here at DQ. We want to unlock experienced professionals from their corporate careers and back them to build their own business. So Wally and I created Founder Unlocked, a series of podcasts sharing some of the lessons we've learned over more than 20 years of building and selling businesses.

SPEAKER_02

We bootstrapped the business for the first seven years, so we didn't take any external capital. And in 2017, uh we exited the business to Concentrics, and the four founders actually left on day one.

SPEAKER_01

We talk about everything from validating your idea to winning your first customers. That is the best evidence that you can get that there's actually value to what you're offering. Like someone is willing to pay you for it.

SPEAKER_02

And there's nothing more exciting than getting that first customer. One of our portfolio company's clever benefits, which is based in Sweden. So about six weeks ago, she landed her first paying customer. The excitement from all of us, from her as well as from us, was amazing. So, how to fundraise? Fundraising is not the only option for your company, and and nor is it the goal.

SPEAKER_01

Check it out on YouTube at DQ Ventures Official or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

SPEAKER_03

What you're looking at that as how you would build your own company. What we're looking for is to accelerate people who've already noticed a problem that's that's worth solving, and then giving them the tools to accelerate them and then take a piece of it. How important do you think it is to have domain expertise when you're building a business?

SPEAKER_04

It definitely helps. And I think if you're a first-time founder, it's even more important. It probably makes sense to do something you know a lot about. The first few sales of any business, B2B or B2C, but I think especially B2B are the most difficult. And if you can if you have an existing network and understanding and credibility that'll open the door and help you close deals as well, then yeah, I think it probably makes sense. It's not an excuse for not talking to customers if you think you know them, right? I would really like advise first-time kind of founders, especially outside of their domain, don't try and build anything where it's winner-takes all, right? It's hard for a winner-takes-all business to niche down, but always give yourself the ability to target a smaller segment of the audience with a narrower product. It's just you have less surface area to be wrong on, basically. Don't like create a plan that means that you need to raise external capital, at least before you've kind of proven that you can get clients and that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03

Which means don't build something that requires massive scale and advertising revenue in order to make money.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah. And don't hire a salesperson to fix a sales problem. Yeah, that's a great one, actually. If you as a founder can't sell it, you're not doing the right thing.

SPEAKER_03

A family friend of ours had a plaster plastering business and he had, I don't know, 100 employees. And my my dad asked him once, he said, you know, if if uh you had a contract and you none of your people turned up, could you go and do the work yourself? And he said, Of course I could. What kind of a boss would I be if I couldn't do the work myself? And I think that's that's something that a lot of people building businesses now don't necessarily think.

SPEAKER_04

You've got to earn the right to continue to do what you do and see the opportunities.

SPEAKER_03

Thanks, Tobes. Cool. I always find talking to Tobes really interesting. He's a bit of a kindred spirit. So that was great. That was Toby Scregg of Blue Mongoose. And if you liked that interview and you'd like more of the same, look for found the stories on YouTube under DQ Ventures Official, or find it wherever you get your podcast.