I have a great idea, its for a flying car. Everyone in the developed world will buy one if we can price it at $400 USD. Would you invest?
In a nutshell that's what your idea is to an investor or a developer. An idea. It's on you to make it more than that.
I can't tell you what works for everyone but I can tell you what has worked for me. There were a bunch of missteps along the way and I spent a bunch of my own money on an offshore team before finally doing it right and recruiting in North America. I have built and sold three service companies in the last six years but I am shifting to building a company around a platform. I have a background in consulting for technologies like IP Transit, Telecom, Enterprise Storage and Virtualization. I don't talk the same kind of tech as software developers but I know they are highly rational people who value their time. To attract the right kind of co-founder I needed I built a company around my idea. I used Vesting Schedules to ensure everyone is actively participating in the growth of the business. Here is what worked:
First, I found non technical co-founders who shared my vision. I started with someone who at the time was a partner of mine in another business, they are an amazing salesperson. Together we sold the idea to four companies in the states and one company in the UK. I expanded from that co-founder to bring on a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) who gets growth hacking, a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) who has built and sold his own financial company, and finally a CPO (Chief Product Officer) who has over 15 years of experience in the industry and loves our idea.
Second, I brought on advisors to our advisory board that are highly regarded experts in our industry. People who are well regarded, who are published and most importantly know a ton of others in our industry who can help us grow explosively when we are ready for market.
Third, I brought highly regarded development experts to our board of advisors, folks who are on the core team of popular open source technologies we will be using or are contributors.
Fourth, we applied for all the startup programs we could that don't take equity. Most give you some type of credits for their service/product, access to their engineering teams and allow you to state your associations with the company. We got into every single one of the programs we tried to get into.
Fifth, I leveraged my network to get introduced to investors. One agreed to invest in our company after we launch the platform.
Six, I recruited for a CTO to join the team to help us build the product. It took three months, I interviewed over 200 people. We had five candidates who agreed to help us build it. The developer we went with to be our CTO has plenty of experience and we are confident in his ability to lead us to ship the product.
In summary, my unproven method (we haven't launched yet so it's not a proven model) is that you don't try to raise money or build the product till you build the company. If you attract great people to the idea then others will want to join you and in the end you can build a great business.
/my2cents