51–60 of 76 posts
Just learn to program, every minute that you spend futzing around trying to find developers who'll do it for free or little money is one minute further away from you have the development skills to write your own product.
Analogy; Can a non-programmer manage programmers?
Edit: recent article by GrooveHQ (non-technical) founder that may be relevant: https://www.groovehq.com/blog/non-technical-founder
So while you probably could do this in your bedroom, alone-alone, chances are you'll end up with an insecure, unstable, broken hacky mutant that costs too much to run and includes things people don't actually want.
But I would say that. I'm the guy you should hire :)
As a founder of 6 figure MRR SaaS, it is possible if you can hire good developers overseas for less. That said it is really useful if you know a little code or have someone who can vet good coders for you. Take your time with hiring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you assume that water quality consultants would buy a software product from you alone? Selling is hard, and a big part of it is knowing your customer, and gaining their trust. This guy would have a much better chance at accomplishing that. He had a lot of value, you just failed to see it. He made the right choice by finding someone else.
There's a lot of value available by building apps for strangers for free? All I can see is risk. If you can find a way to de-risk that business model, then you'll have your value. Perhaps you meant potential . But then there's potential in most everything. Every manuscript in a slush pile has a certain amount of potential.
I encourage you to try and build those intangible pieces yourself. You'll quickly find it's not trivial in any way.
I think Nathan Barry (ConvertKit founder) is originally a designer? He might still know how to code. I'm not sure. But his business seems successful enough. There are probably dozens of less well-known examples. Edit: recent article by GrooveHQ (non-technical) founder that may be relevant: https://www.groovehq.com/blog/non-technical-founder
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot of value available by building apps for strangers for free? All I can see is risk. If you can find a way to de-risk that business model, then you'll have your value. Perhaps you meant potential . But then there's potential in most everything. Every manuscript in a slush pile has a certain amount of potential.
No, I meant Value. He's an expert in the industry, he has connections to potential customers, he presumably has their trust. That's crazy valuable. That takes years to develop, and there's no "hack" to get around it. I encourage you to try and build those intangible pieces yourself. You'll quickly find it's not trivial in any way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar experience here. If the other person in the proposed partnership cannot demonstrate equivalent-value skills and equivalent previous success in critical-to-the-business areas where I'm weak (or uninterested) like sales, marketing, biz-dev, enterprise sales, acquiring VC - then my answer is almost certainly going to be "Sure, $8k/month is my usual rate - discounts of 20% for 3 month or longer block bookings. Wh…
> If the other person refers to themselves as "An ideas guy!", my rates double, and require 50% up front. This is logical from a developer standpoint, but has it ever worked. Has any one ever paid 50% upfront.
I'm a developer and have helped bootstrap a couple of SaaS. The problem is that in most partnerships like this, the other person can usually only offer ideas or something very minimal with regards to the success of the business. I usually end up just doing everything myself. Unless you offer something besides just the idea (money, contacts, industry experience). The partnership will not work. I've had to quit a few s…
Yeah in a startup or small business I think every founder needs to do work. You can't have people who only essentially generate work for others. There are so many things that need doing when you're small that aren't directly related to development but still need to be done: applying for grants, tax concessions, marketing, building communities, competitive analysis, market research, payroll, accounting.