How do I recruit an effective business partner?

Think of this partner as an investor. They basically will be willing to take a reduced salary in exchange for stock. You already managed to convince some investors to give you money, so you need to sell the partner in a similar way. You need to convince them that it's worth going for a reduced fee in exchange for the payback they'll get done the road.

One challenge for you though is to find someone that can manage the software development effort. It's often hard for marketing and sales people to assess technical people and vice versa.

You said:

It is increasingly difficult to find developers that aren't already involved in their own project.

Which may be the key. You can exchange skills. Entrepreneurial programmers are often the type you want ... they have some savvy, they are innovative etc. You could find a programmer with a promising project and offer to support them from a marketing and sales POV. In return, they could provide programming services for you. Programmers looking to get their own ventures going may be made of the "right stuff" and the assessment is simpler. The added complication is division of time and committing to one thing down the line. As they are driven, I don't think productivity necessarily will suffer when compared to a "stock" programmer simply coding for cash/shares.

If they have faith in your idea and vice versa then motivation should follow a good working relationship.

Also, if you believe in what they are doing and vice versa then you can have multiple eggs in baskets etc

Not saying it is ideal or perfect, but as you say, it is sort of two parts of the same puzzle, technical and marketing/sales.

It's certainly tough but don't settle! If your idea has merit and potential, you'll hopefully be doing it for a long time. And you want to give it every chance to succeed. When you do come up with whom you think is a great partner, get to know them well. Make sure you understand their skillset (especially since it's an area you don't have great expertise in) and know their motivation. Spend time with them.

Best of luck,

Rotman, you could checkout matchfounders.com and see if it helps.

My sincere suggestion is go to meet-ups and start communicating with developers and before that don discuss with them about your start up .

keep talking with them and analyse them and see if your vision matches his vision and ask him if he is interested in co-founder role.

but till then don make coders know that you don't know much about coding because few of them may take you a ride.

Finding co-founder is not easy task as you have to meet lots and lots and lots of people and also you need to match up their confidence and you also need to market in such a way that they need to gain confidence on you and on your product.

I would challenge the fact that you need a business partner.

Why give something away when you don't need to. Getting business partners can be tricky, and could cause things to go wrong down the line. I lost my first multi million pound business by taking on the wrong partner... having a business partner is worse than a marriage... and we all know how many of those last.

If you have funding and have the idea, all you need is a good project manager and team. Getting these (today) is very inexpensive. I use odesk for Project Managers and programmers (although I let the PM do the hiring since he is responsible for the delivery of the product).

When the time is right, if things go well - you'll have people knocking at your door to be business partners (and then you can decide if you really need em).