Ask YC: To continue, or not to continue ... how do you know?

If I could find some programmers who won't dismiss my value after I've transferred my insights, I'd gladly do it. But judging from the thinking processes of what I see on posts here ...

Just to give an example, a few days ago a "bored developer" posted a post saying he was looking for good ideas. Whenever I see MBA/Financial-types posting on Hacker News looking for programmers, the response is usually, "Why should I partner with you - what value do you offer since you can't code?"

So I asked a simple question on this post: Suppose I share some ideas with you that you wind up developing. What do you offer in return? I was hoping maybe an arrangement like "I'll code on the weekends for your idea if you share an idea I like enough to pursue" or something. Instead everybody kept downmodding my post; last time I checked it was in the negative something range.

So if I can find people willing to go it on equal terms ...

Your situation is seems similar to Guy Kawasaki's Truemors experiment. You have something that you believe is interesting/useful but the market didn't believe you. IBM looking into it signals a market change in your favor. Since that's the case, I say do it.

However, it sounds like you need two things (er...people). A star programmer and a star evangelist. The first can be had (for a price). The second is harder to find. Either you need to become one or you need to hire someone that already is one.

Reference: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html

If you couldn't pull it off in six years, do you think another year or two will be enough? Do you think you can pull it together faster than IBM (and the dozen other competitors that will spring up once IBMs work becomes more widely known)? Ideas are worth practically nothing--you have no monopoly on your idea, unless it sucks, and even then, you probably aren't the only person working on it.

I ran my previous business for nearly seven years, before throwing in the towel. It was profitable for about six of those seven years, and it kept me in food and houses...but it wasn't a success, by my definition, and I won't twice make the mistake of continuing a business that I don't believe can win in its market...not just get by, but win. Perhaps you're not making that mistake, but I'd suggest you change your tactics immediately. Six years is an awful long time to have nothing to show.

Here's my take on the question as well as few of your responses throughout.

Stop worrying about programmers. If you have been toying with this idea for 6 years, take another one year and learn how to program. if you're cash strapped there are plenty of online tutorials and good old manuals. If have some cash outsource it to india or elance. if people are paid with money, they sometimes tend not to 'care' what they are working on, but give results.

The fact that IBM is doing research in this field means that they think that it might be worth it to work on this.

I think you need to act on it and if you spent that amount of time mulling it over, checking into things. get it done and see what people think, let the market decide. If someone doesn't get it, explain to them why they should. people thought blogs were stupid, all the other search engines didn't buy into google, now they wish they had.

I was in a similar thought process when i started my site, after i started it i kept coming across competitors i never even heard of. the fact that people are using my site and getting results was my 'vindication', after all there are a lot of other services that guarantee so much but didn't work for some people.

as far a i know ideas are worthless. pg talks about it some where. put it out there and see what happens, if IBM looks into what you are doing and blatantly copies you, sue them, but expect a long drawn-out legal battle that you won't win.

Lastly, people might have a hard time helping you out here if you don't talk about your idea. People might be interested in helping you out, by closely guarding your idea people might not help out.

You've made the mistake of believing an idea has value. It doesn't. An idea plus a good execution of it has value. If you can't convince a developer that you bring needed value to the execution of that idea, and you can't pay developers to work on your idea, then you have nothing.

In six years you could have learned to program well enough to build a kickass demo--the fact that you haven't makes it pretty clear to developers that you don't believe in your idea enough to commit your own time to it (other than, apparently, thinking really hard about it)...but you'd be really happy to have someone else commit time to it and share the results with you. Hell, with the quality of modern tools, if you started today, you could have a proof of concept running in a year, even if you've never seen a terminal or a text editor before. Python, Ruby, Perl, and even PHP, make developing simple applications, well, simple.

Sorry if I seem to be dismissing you without knowledge of your idea or your actual work in the field, but this is what you're facing in trying to get someone to write your software for you, for free. This is what you have to overcome, and I hope I've made it clear that the way you are presenting it is not going to do that. What you think you're saying, and what an engineer hears you saying, are apparently two very different things. I suspect you think you're saying, "I've done all of the legwork and research and hard work leading up to actual development, and now I just need a technical person to put these well-researched pieces together." But, an engineer hears, "I've done nothing but have super cool ideas for the past six years, and now I'd like you to implement my vague and over-reaching specifications into a product, for free, and share the results with me."

You can't really blame them for not signing on, right?