I'm a non-technical founder developing a karaoke mobile app. How I should architect my app in term of software/servers used and programming languages?

Cross-functional, proactive, user focused: you do not want somebody who will stop if he does not have a wireframe to work from or who will not plan for common error messages just because that was not in the specs that were given to him. You need someone who loves the product you are building and not just someone who can write good code.

I've always hired only ridiculously brilliant engineers and those that were either entrepreneurs or entrepreneurially minded (i.e. attended startup weekend, contributed to open source, blogged, etc). The best way to find them is to go to the events they attend. Typically it's developer meetups, open source or programming language oriented conferences, etc. To add a heightened filter, maybe only entrepreneurial oriented events like Business as Software, StartupSchool, or StartupDrinks. Also, using Angel.co to find companies that were once listed, but didn't raise or seem to have "Sunsetted" might be a good strategy. The question I always ask myself when I'm about to do sourcing for talent, or marketing is: 1) Who do I want, or what are examples of those people in the real world? 2) What places do they go/hangout, tools do they use, news sources they read, etc? Be strict with your filters and you should find some candidates... the hard part is convincing them that your project is more interesting then their current job/project/ideas/company/etc - cause these people typically have many options for work.

I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).

I have worked with some of the Top 50 Fortune 50 companies for Mobile/Web/Google Glass Development Projects. Never work for free if you don't want to devalue yourself later. If the client is big (read rich) he won't mind paying for some initial Mockups. The whole point of working with big clients is so you can charge them more than you would charge an average client. Let me know if you wish to talk about it. Willing to talk for free :)

I hate to say it, but Google would have got you a much faster answer than this site. I just typed in "Software life cycle" into google, and there are many great articles.