31–40 of 114 posts
Feedback and willingness to be flexible are the solution
Who cares if the original idea sucks - is the prospective idea guy willing to invest time effort blood and tears making something happen - constantly measuring and validating ideas as they go
If yes leap in with both feet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"meet interesting people and learn lots of new stuff. Freelancing is almost never that." Not my experience. Freelancing is what you make of it. To get some experience you may do some boring stuff early on, but if you've got no or little experience your 'startup' will likely fail. 90% of the freelancing work I've done over the last few years has generally been 'learning new stuff' and 'meeting interesting people' in s…
Yes, I agree that freelancing can be fascinating work. I mainly wrote from my own perspective (and since HN was once called "Startup News", I imagine also from that of others), where I do not have the right credentials or connections to get very amazing freelance work. I'm 20 and without a degree. If anything I could maybe get slave-trade $20/hr Odesk work or something, but not considerably better. Now, since (good)…
I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour. I know many people without any major credentials who are doing just fine in freelancing, making good money doing what they like to do.
Never bother with odesk - you wouldn't have gotten a YC-startup gig on odesk - why look for anything else there? Work your network/connections - if you don't have any, build them up - that's what takes time and effort.
I also suspect many people on this forum (and on specific topics) are 'startup' focused. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, I do feel it sets a lot of people up for failure ("fail fast! fail often!") when many of them aren't psychologically or financially prepared for so such failures. We rarely read about the failures of people who attempt 'startups'. Even when we do, it's often a post-mortem look from someone who's now writing from a position of success, reviewing their own failures in public for others to see. The implicit (sometimes explicit) message is "see, even if you fail, you can be successful later in the same space".
Good luck to you on your journey.
Maybe I am doing something wrong but I have never been approached by such an idea guy - the last closest was running an insurance brokerage and just got fed up with poor delivery from his current devs yet had a laundry lost of features needed in his site Maybe if you are getting approached by morons a lot you might want to review where you are hanging out - just there mus be some reason
If you can define precisely what you want, then you will have much more hope in recruiting developers.
Why? 1. The lack of ambiguity of the scope gives developers the opportunity to determine their costs with some accuracy. 2. The requirements define the benefits of the project. Either the developers are convinced your logic is correct, and therefore will make money, or they do not. The former lot are those that you can convince.
"You'd be crazy to have me work on this for a few months for 50% equity when you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity. Of course, if you don't think it is worth spending a few months of your own time why should I take a chance on it?"
6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes. It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it. The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I agree that freelancing can be fascinating work. I mainly wrote from my own perspective (and since HN was once called "Startup News", I imagine also from that of others), where I do not have the right credentials or connections to get very amazing freelance work. I'm 20 and without a degree. If anything I could maybe get slave-trade $20/hr Odesk work or something, but not considerably better. Now, since (good)…
"Connections". You worked on connections to get in a YC startup (an amazingly small number of potential opportunities in the universe of opportunities). I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour. I know many people without any major credentials who are doing just fine in freelancing, making good money doing what they like to do. Never bother with odesk - you wouldn…
>Work your network/connections
That's exactly the issue. I didn't have that. At all. Before that I just hacked on stuff because I thought it was fun / interesting. I also came from a tiny country without a tech scene.
>I'm suspecting that you had a hankering to work at a "startup" and that colored your behaviour.
I do love startups. But I before starting my job search I spent about a month trying to figure out freelancing. In the end I decided against it (for reasons listed above) and went onto what I -- at the time -- considered the second best option: employment.
It was a great success. Instead of trying to cold-email people for dev-scraps that are so un-important that they'll let someone with no degree and no industry experience and no references work on it vs. someone with a CS degree + 5-10 years of industry experience + heaps of people with impressive business titles who can recommend his work and doing whatever crappy work I can get my hands on just to "work on connections", I now get to work every day among a set of incredibly smart, compassionate, warm, successful people who want to invest in me and want me to become the best programmer and contributor that I can be.
That's why I chose the employment route: Once you're in, you're in and you can focus on what you love and growing yourself instead of constantly having to worry to put food / contracts on the table.
And by "something", I don't mean code (nor the idea, but there are things beside those). Seriously, I'm a developer, I don't give a damn if my potential cofounders could code or not, that's redundant. I would look for someone who has what I can't easily get. Someone having an accurate view of the state of an industry, or being nosy and/or well-connected enough to be able to get this view. Or someone some marketing/sales skills. Or someone with some proof that people (preferably people with money) are interested in the product.
But good ideas are quite rare.
"You'd be crazy to have me work on this for a few months for 50% equity when you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity. Of course, if you don't think it is worth spending a few months of your own time why should I take a chance on it?"
6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes. It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it. The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the so…
You're absolutely right that this isn't scalable, but if you're just looking to validate your idea why shouldn't an app made by someone with a few months of experience suffice? Once you've proven there's value in the idea with the prototype, I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get more experienced developers on board.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes. It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it. The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the so…
Yeah, pretty sure I take offense at the idea that my skills are equivalent to 6 months of crash education by a novice.