61–70 of 104 posts
This is a bit like saying "I have a great idea for a painting. Will you paint it for me, and then give me half the money you get from selling it?"
Your analogy is apt. What you (like a lot of programmers) fail to realize is that selling a painting is extraordinarily difficult. They didn't coin the phrase "starving artist" for fun.
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Your analogy is apt. What you (like a lot of programmers) fail to realize is that selling a painting is extraordinarily difficult. They didn't coin the phrase "starving artist" for fun.
Why can't I upmod run4yourlives on this? There are no mod arrows on his comment?
The fact that you don't know programming is no big deal. Being a programmer for over 12 years and looking forward to my next startup, what I can tell you is that ideas do matter. Consider this.The same amount of time that Google spend building a billion dollar startup is what a two bit outfit spends generating a million dollars. Or another that goes belly up. In other words ideas and execution equally matter. Maybe e…
Do you by chance have a link to the Forbes study in question?
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This is potentially terrible advice. Temperamentally, many people are poorly suited for programming. The OP might be a great designer, writer and bootstrap marketeer who could benefit from a partnership. I'd advocate for assessing your skills and honestly figuring out if you have anything to offer to a founding team (a lot of skills really don't matter until you've actually built something of value). If not, sure-- l…
Well, not too long ago I posted my dilemma about me being very business oriented and having design skill, and still not being able to find programmers as they were turned off. And the majority of the replies I received were ones telling me to learn how to program. Just because I'm learning to code doesn't mean, however, that I am tossing my other skills away. I find that I have a much much much better understanding o…
I learned to program just for these exact reasons (better understanding of the problem domain for a business, better communication with technical staff, etc.) By all rights, I should be the absolute worst programmer in the world. But based on unofficial world rankings, it turns out that I'm only in the bottom five ;-)
Programming skills (however limited) and business savvy are a very potent combination. I don't regret learning to code at all...
Get an NDA with anyone you work with. "Ideas are easy, execution is hard" is a cop-out excuse by people who don't have any patentable worthwhile ideas of their own!
Get an NDA with anyone you work with. "Ideas are easy, execution is hard" is a cop-out excuse by people who don't have any patentable worthwhile ideas of their own!
I have a lot of ideas. Some are worthwhile. And yet I think execution is the hard part.
If you're not planning on paying, and want to create a team, you'd better learn how to program. I was in your same position several months ago. I tried looking for programmers, and those that I found were turned off by the fact that I had no programming knowledge/experience. So, I got fed up and decided to learn how to program. I started with Python, dabbled in some SQL, and am currently trying to refine my Django sk…
This is potentially terrible advice. Temperamentally, many people are poorly suited for programming. The OP might be a great designer, writer and bootstrap marketeer who could benefit from a partnership. I'd advocate for assessing your skills and honestly figuring out if you have anything to offer to a founding team (a lot of skills really don't matter until you've actually built something of value). If not, sure-- l…
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Are there books you suggest i read, or tutorials to start with?
Even though getting started with PHP and MySQL is easy, please avoid the temptation as it will brain-damage you in ways that will take a long time to recover from.
But there is some really good PHP code out there. The problem is finding it--particularly for a non-programmer. DokuWiki is very nice. Flyspray aint even half bad. Wordpress, while extraordinarily popular, is a bit painful to look at...it's getting better, but it's not ideal to learn from (I'm not knocking Wordpress...I use it for two blogs and recommend it to everyone who asks about blogging software). The majority of Joomla is downright scary bad--I feel dumber every day that I spend working with it.
It might turn out it's not such a great idea at the current time after all because as a non-programmer you think too vaguely and declaratively. This isn't anything personal about you, it's just human nature. Writing code forces you to think precisely and consider practicalities that are otherwise hidden from you as a user.
>because as a non-programmer you think too vaguely and declaratively. Youch. That's a painful trap of circular logic to fall into. Keep in mind that most businesses have been started by non-programmers.
We're talking about web technology businesses here, I presume. Otherwise OP wouldn't be trying to round up a programmer. The vast, vast, vast majority of web application startups are started by technical founders. Even the exceptions tend to bring some technical know-how to the endeavor (Digg, MySpace are examples of the non-programming founder, and they're the only two successful startups that meet that criterion I can think of off-hand).
Non-technical founders can create value. But that's hard to prove in the initial "Hi, do you wanna start a company?" phase. That's why he's not getting much traction from developers he talks to.