61–70 of 86 posts
As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code: 1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry. 2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject. 3. Bring a des…
I've been thinking about this for a long time too. One of the questions Im sure other people in a similar boat would ask is: which programming language?
One that kept popping up often in my search was "Python." Consensus was that it was pretty user friendly. Plus, the guys at Dropbox built their application with it...if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me. I say, just pick one and get started.
As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code: 1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry. 2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject. 3. Bring a des…
As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code: 1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry. 2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject. 3. Bring a des…
But, I have HUGE respect for devs. I honestly am amazed at the stuff my staff developer can do. At a certain point I just had to give and say, "Well, I just need to make sure I can attract good developers and treat them like the wizards that they are".
As a "non-technical" person myself, I hate when some frat-boy has a pizza/movie delivery service "idea" and is just looking for someone to build the website. Ughh. I never want to be that business guy.
I think that's why I love Hacker News. It gives me an insight into a world I really respect, and I want to understand as much as I can....without actually hacking.
As a "non-technical" person who has had success finding "technical" people to work with, instead of trying to learn to code: 1. Become a domain expert - know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry. 2. Find Customers - Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject. 3. Bring a des…
I went to the same meetup, and also found it interesting how many questions about non-technical co-founders there were. I'll share my story about meeting my "technical co-founder". I studied Engineering Mechanics for 6 and a half years, so I'm not exactly non-technical, but when I finished and was trying to start a company, it had been probably 6 years since I'd taken any serious programming (or taken a programming c…
This is because I'm at an advantage. I can easily learn and do whatever it is they know and do. Things such as marketing, refining the UI, feature ideas, user interaction, etc. These are things that are MUCH easier to do and learn than programming.
I would not start a company with anyone who wasn't an EXCEPTIONAL programmer. No, a weekend programmer will not do. Honestly, you'd have either provide funds, or something of extremely high value for you to receive equal ownership of any company I spend my valuable time and work on.
The only time I would recommend you spend your time learning how to program is if your roadmap includes hiring programmers better than you to improve or redo the code. You'd have to build the prototype yourself, get funds, hire good programmers and take off from there.
Other than that, I wouldn't automatically join your project, even with a prototype.
Jeeze, I'm doing my best here, C is hard! I will say no single effort has been more enlightening to me regarding computer science than trying to understand C. I highly recommend it to anyone with any programming experience.
That's kinda what I was hearing lurking around HN for the past 6 months. I've never written a line of code in my life but 3 weeks ago I stopped looking aimlessly for someone with skills, and I'm back to the drawing board learning Ruby. Of course, I'll almost surely still need a technical co-founder in 6-10 months. But I'll be in a better position to see if he's good and I'll understand what he's doing. Also, I'm meeting lots of programmers this way. If all I get out of these 2/3h per day is a great co-founder, it'll be very well worth it.
As a noob, I find the stuff suggested on the post a tad intimidating. It was good for me that my first contact with ruby was the very soft http://tryruby.org/ and the second one was Chris Pine's book http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/?Chapter=00
Stop looking for a qualified medical professional to treat your illness, just pick up a couple of books! Really, I don't want to discourage anyone from learning, but suggesting that you can learn enough to launch a startup is kind of like deciding that you can do web design because you've used Word. Some people will be able to pick it up in a month, and some will never learn to write decent code. There's a reason peo…
The first iteration of a startup will almost always be wrong and you'll have to throw most of it away. So it doesn't matter so much whether its the best code in the world or not. The important thing is that you learn from your first iteration. If you don't have a tech background and hand off the first implementation to a superstar, it's very possible that you won't learn anything. If you do it yourself, you will learn a lot one way or another.
Also, it helps in many ways to be able to demonstrate that you are not an idiot.