81–90 of 229 posts
Where do people even get this kind of money to lose
Hard to rationalize the spend though. Blowing all your savings on a business venture is recklessly risky. Buy the home or invest it in solid business/stocks.
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Do Flutter and cover all 3. Okay Flutter Web is pretty bad, but if you are cash strapped and need to move fast, Flutter is the way to go. I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible…
I would be a happy Flutter convert if the Web output was better.
I am solo founder and invested literally all my money into this mad startup pursuit. There is a difference between loosing $200k with comfortable cushion and spending your last $10k.
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
I've seen two types of non-technical founders that stood a chance:
- The industry insider who knows exactly what problem to solve, and who can sell the solution effectively. For example, I saw a woman who had closed $500k of revenue by month 3. She knew everyone in her niche. That kind of product/market fit will gloss over a lot of other problems.
- The hustler who learns enough Rails (or whatever) to glue together a prototype. Here, you're looking at a non-technical founder with basically "boot camp" coding skills. This works best in markets where the basic tech is easy, but the business depends on (say) deal-making abilities. For example, two-sided marketplaces are technically easy, but you need to get two different groups of people to the table.
There are a lot of "non-technical" founders out there who aren't especially good at the non-technical part of their business, either. But non-technical founders who really understand their market and who can act their company's first salesperson? They have options, especially in smaller B2B niches where outsiders don't even know where to start.
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I can't help but agree. Technology is hard to grasp without study. Study takes time, which founders don't have. People with technical expertise are expensive. If you don't have the expertise yourself, you have to hire it. He's got 200k and he's bled 125k of that just to make his MVP. That's utterly insane to me.
App studios are often quoting high prices though. I have no idea about app development, but I regularly hear about quotes for relatively simple apps (i.e. you could do it with Wordpress and a custom theme as a web app) that are 30-50k euros. I don't know if these agencies just make insane profits or if they really make everything super complicated and need three developers working for a month to produce a simple crud…
Lost is a wobbly word. If we put $200k on the table, in stacks of crisp clean bills, and said "This money is going to found a start-up", then four years later there's nothing left.... that stings. On the other hand, suppose you (foolishly) frame things like the RIAA/MPAA do, that every lost opportunity is a real financial loss. And suppose you're smart enough to go and work for BigTech pulling in $100k/pa. But instea…
It's not as if you just went to Vegas and bet it all on black.
> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-foun…
Not really I know of a non technical founder who spent $300k on developing their website/app. I was a user of that platform, and while it wasn't fancy, could have been better, and someone eventually did do it better, it did what it was supposed to do. They had first mover advantage and funny enough it got bought out by that same company that did it better for $20-30m. Sure being a non technical founder is harder, but…
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+10 on point 3. Even as a highly technical CTO, it is shocking what outsourced dev agencies will try to do. I've seen dev agencies try to conclude engagements with a "successfully working app" but havent delivered any source code, or when source code is delivered it cannot actually be compiled into the successfully working app. As a technical CTO I can smell this a mile away and work it into SoWs, but I wonder how ma…
I've consulted in this sort of role for a startup which hired a dev agency. A few months in, we were behind schedule. I've asked them access to their git repo and built some graphs with the commits and LOC changes of every dev we paid for. It became clear that these devs were working on multiple other assignments and were not really dedicated to us. Without these sort of insights, it's hard to judge if they are hones…
- For slightly more legal protection, the code should be in YOUR OWN git repo, not the dev agency's repo
- If you are giving some upfront $ or milestone payment, you should also contractually now own the code up to that point in time
- You should not declare a milestone success (and should not pay) until you can independently compile the app straight from git (front end and backend) (Also, watch out for hard-coded domains where you are secretly pointing to their backend and not to your independently compiled one)
- App QA should ONLY be on the version of the app where you compiled/deployed the full stack yourself
- You should deploy the app into your own cloud to ensure you actually have all the pieces. Super extra credit: Build Terraform/Ansible/Chef into the SoW and final payment should depend on deployment into your own environment by YOU (not the agency)
- You should learn how to build/compile/deploy yourself or hire an independent person (not the devs) who can do this for you
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So, if it's very hard to start a software company based on paying contractors for software development -- which seems true to me -- there's another warning here for software contractors/consultants . If someone is paying you, as contracting engineering talent for hire on a consulting/hourly/iteration basis, to develop an app or product they hope will be the foundation of a new business -- chances are high this won't…
OT, but I thought I'd ask, since you seem to have experience with this sort of work... In your experience, is it possible to negotiate work at a rate where one would only be working 2d / wk? I'd imagine it's hard to negotiate such an agreement with a company because they want work done on a faster timeline?
But there's a lot of work that isn't your hourly billable that goes into running such a business too, administrative overhead, client relationship management/development, etc.
I personally ultimately decided this kind of consultancy was not work I found rewarding. I also was not one of the owners/principals, and was not there very long, so I'm not really an expert in this kind of business, and probably there are people who might be better to give you advice. But since you asked.