If you can bring money to the table, that's a big plus. This can either be from personal investment, or customers you have already lined up dying to buy Product X, which you need a partner to code up for you because it doesn't exist yet.
Design and mockups are helpful. If you have an idea for a web app, create mockups, diagrams, and flow-charts. Explain what every link and button does on the webpage. How it should behave, what should be happening behind the scenes, etc... Balsamiq Mockups, Photoshop, and Visio/OmniGraffle are your friend. The more detailed the better, so long as it's intuitive and easy to follow along.
If it's an iOS app, build the GUI. There are a lot of apps that help you mockup iOS stuff. Same goes for Mac OS X and Windows programs.
And of course, you should be able/willing-to-learn how to do business stuff. Finance, accounting, legal work, incorporating, all of the overhead that's part of running a company. Get deals with vendors, payment processing companies, capital planning (e.g. budget out how much it'll cost to host on Amazon AWS vs. Rackspace vs. Linode, etc...). Market research, what competitors are up to, how you plan to outflank them, etc...
In a nutshell, you need to make yourself valuable to a programmer. The more refined your idea is (assuming it's good, has an achievable revenue model), and the more you bring to the table, you increase your likelihood of finding someone who wants to work with you.
Where do most programmers hang out? StackOverflow, Github, Bitbucket, blogs, IRC, Hacker News, at work, in front of their computers hacking. There are programmer meetups you can find on Meetup.org too.
And of course, nothing is stopping you from learning how to code! I'm also a business/finance guy, but taught myself Objective-C/Cocoa and Python/Django. It's perfectly doable, but takes time, dedication, determination, and patience. Grab some books and get crackin! :)
Design and mockups are helpful. If you have an idea for a web app, create mockups, diagrams, and flow-charts. Explain what every link and button does on the webpage. How it should behave, what should be happening behind the scenes, etc... Balsamiq Mockups, Photoshop, and Visio/OmniGraffle are your friend. The more detailed the better, so long as it's intuitive and easy to follow along.
If it's an iOS app, build the GUI. There are a lot of apps that help you mockup iOS stuff. Same goes for Mac OS X and Windows programs.
And of course, you should be able/willing-to-learn how to do business stuff. Finance, accounting, legal work, incorporating, all of the overhead that's part of running a company. Get deals with vendors, payment processing companies, capital planning (e.g. budget out how much it'll cost to host on Amazon AWS vs. Rackspace vs. Linode, etc...). Market research, what competitors are up to, how you plan to outflank them, etc...
In a nutshell, you need to make yourself valuable to a programmer. The more refined your idea is (assuming it's good, has an achievable revenue model), and the more you bring to the table, you increase your likelihood of finding someone who wants to work with you.
Where do most programmers hang out? StackOverflow, Github, Bitbucket, blogs, IRC, Hacker News, at work, in front of their computers hacking. There are programmer meetups you can find on Meetup.org too.
And of course, nothing is stopping you from learning how to code! I'm also a business/finance guy, but taught myself Objective-C/Cocoa and Python/Django. It's perfectly doable, but takes time, dedication, determination, and patience. Grab some books and get crackin! :)