Why Non-Technical Founders Need Technical Due Diligence
Technical due diligence is the process of evaluating the quality, sustainability, and risk profile of a software product's technical foundation. It is standard practice before acquisitions and major investments, but non-technical founders should apply it much earlier—before selecting a development partner, during the build process, and before seeking investment or partnership.
Without technical due diligence, you are investing significant capital in a product you cannot independently evaluate. You trust your development partner's quality standards because you have no framework for verifying them. You approve architecture decisions you do not understand because you lack the vocabulary to ask probing questions. And when something goes wrong—a security breach, a performance failure, a missed deadline—you cannot diagnose whether the problem is a one-time issue or a symptom of systemic quality failures.
This checklist gives you that framework. You do not need to read code to use it. You need to ask the right questions, understand the expected answers, and recognize when something falls below acceptable standards. When you partner with Sizzle Ventures, these quality standards are built into the engagement from day one, but the checklist is equally valuable for evaluating any development partner or inherited codebase.
Evaluating Code Quality Without Reading Code
You can assess code quality through proxy metrics without understanding the code itself. Start with test coverage—the percentage of the codebase that is verified by automated tests. Ask your development partner what their test coverage percentage is. For a production SaaS application, 60-80% coverage is acceptable, and above 80% is excellent. Below 40% means significant portions of the application are unverified, and changes risk introducing undetected bugs.
Ask about code review practices. Every piece of code should be reviewed by at least one developer other than the author before it is merged into the main codebase. This is not about distrust—it is about catching errors, sharing knowledge, and maintaining consistent quality standards. If your development partner does not practice code review, code quality depends entirely on individual discipline, which is inherently inconsistent.
Request a demonstration of the application's error handling. What happens when the database is unavailable? When a user submits invalid data? When a third-party API fails? A well-built application handles these scenarios gracefully—showing clear error messages to users and logging detailed information for developers. A poorly built application crashes, shows technical error messages, or silently loses data. You can observe this during a demo without understanding any code.
Infrastructure and Operations Checklist
Infrastructure due diligence focuses on how your product is hosted, deployed, and maintained. Start with hosting: where does your application run, and who manages the servers? The answer should reference a major cloud provider—AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure—with managed services for the database, caching, and other core infrastructure. Self-hosted or single-server setups introduce unnecessary risk for a production SaaS product.
Evaluate the deployment process. Ask: how do you deploy new code to production? How long does a deployment take? How do you roll back a failed deployment? The answers should describe an automated pipeline that runs tests, deploys to staging, verifies functionality, and then promotes to production. Manual deployments—where a developer runs commands on a server—are error-prone and a red flag for production systems.
Check the monitoring and alerting setup. Ask: how do you know when something is wrong before customers report it? Your partner should have application performance monitoring that tracks response times, error rates, and system resources. They should have alerts configured for anomalies—a spike in errors, a drop in response time, a database running low on storage. If the answer is "we check the logs when someone reports a problem," monitoring is inadequate for a production product.
The Complete Due Diligence Question Set
For development partner evaluation, ask these questions before signing an engagement. What is your team's experience with this type of product? Can you provide references from similar projects? What is your testing strategy, and what coverage target do you maintain? How do you handle security—specifically authentication, data encryption, and dependency management? What is your deployment process, and do you maintain staging environments? How do you handle handoff if the engagement ends?
For ongoing project evaluation, ask these questions monthly during the build. What is the current test coverage? How many known bugs are in the backlog, and what is the severity breakdown? What technical debt have we accumulated, and when should we address it? Are all dependencies on current, supported versions? When was the last security scan, and were any issues found? What is the deployment frequency, and how many rollbacks have occurred?
For investment or acquisition preparation, add these questions. Is the codebase well-documented enough for a new team to maintain it? Are there any single points of failure—technologies, services, or individuals whose loss would cripple the product? What is the estimated cost to rebuild versus maintain? Are there any licensing or compliance issues with third-party dependencies? These questions give investors confidence that the technical foundation supports the business plan. If you need help conducting technical due diligence on your own product or a potential partner, Sizzle's team provides independent technical assessments that give founders and investors clarity on what has been built and what it is worth.
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