I struggled with this for a while but I feel very confident I do know the key now.
The key is with yourself, which is good news!
First, you can only get out of someone else what you want to put in.
You have decided you are the business side of this relationship and you need the technical side. That's understandable. Now let's pretend I'm the tech guy.
Things I Care About:
-Can I hang out with you?
-How much say do I get?
-How much equity do I get?
-Why should I trust you if I have to do most of the up front work?
-What have you validated about your idea?
-Do you have any useful skills you can quantify other than "business"?
-Can you do design?
-Can you do analytics and measurement?
-Can you get investors?
-Can you get customers? How?
It really comes down to this in my experience:
How does the tech guy know this isn't just an idea you thought up, then he's supposed to build for 6 months every day hoping it will work?
What assurances can you give him?
So one way you can combat the struggle is to give him assurances.
-Line up key partners before you meet him
-Get pre-sales
-Learn to build landing pages and smoke test your idea
-Get real numbers, data and proof there's some market validation
-Run customer development interviews and get data
-Do a wizard of oz MVP (fake it and prove there is merit to the idea)
-Go raise investment early on
-Build an online forum or community around your idea
-Get some more skills like design, growth hacking, online marketing, analytics, etc
Another thing you can do, if you don't want to do all of this, is you can:
-Learn to code yourself
-Figure out how to strip it down to something tiny and pay for someone to build it
It's hard to say more without knowing what your goals are. A friend of mine never gives advice unless he knows the person's goals he is giving advice to first and I love that.
In my own personal experience, I feel I could find a co-founder very fast now, because I would pre-validate the idea, raise money, get customers, wizard of oz MVP it, do customer development and smoke test the hell out of it before even talking to someone.
Having said that, you don't just want any cofounder who can code. That's not great criteria for your business partner. They are your other half. Your ride or die buddy. Trust is important. So you have 2 problems. 1) You can't find a co-founder and 2) You certainly can't find one who fits all those criteria.
If your goal is to get a tech startup built, and you want a great co-founder in my experience if I were doing it now, I'd start by really expanding my skills in:
-Design
-Maybe coding (even enough to hack)
-Customer development
-Raising money
Maybe you have those skills I don't know. But they will certainly help make you more attractive to a co-founder.
I should add that I did end up learning design, becoming a full stack software engineer etc, and I help code at my startup even though I am not the CTO. It's really helped the relationship and honestly, it is such a better feeling to be actually able to help. If you are like me, you probably REALLY don't like hearing that news haha. But I can say, it's not as hard as I thought if you make a commitment that you are going to learn no matter what and just do a little each day.
It takes 1-2 hours a night for a year to learn how to code. You could be sitting here in a year with the same problem, or you could have it solved. I decided to just learn and even though I have an amazing and talented CTO, I am glad I did learn. Its also much better for the business because I know how building little things affects the code base and how much of a bitch some things can be to make. I think about software MUCH differently.
I hope that helps. Take what you like, leave the rest. It's just one man's opinion.