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I'm left wondering, though, what you actually did over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a lot of time. You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code).
> idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website [and writing articles]
I find it hard to believe you can work on those things for two years, day in and day out.
This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it). Two elaborations: 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at sell…
I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doe…
If anything convincing a developer to take your money (assuming you have any) to write code should be orders of magnitude easier than convincing a client to give you money for something that doesn't yet exist.
OP, your biggest mistake is not taking the time out to learn how to code yourself. You said it went on for 2 years, that was plenty of time.
INDEED! In fact I started. Did One Month Rails (a couple of months ago). My github (please don't laugh, but do give out advice): https://github.com/sergioschuler/
Really great writeup, thanks for sharing. I'm left wondering, though, what you actually did over the two years? You imply that you were working on it full time. Two years full time is a lot of time . You can do pretty much anything in that time (including, as others have mentioned, learn to code). > idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website [and writing articles] I find it hard to believe you can w…
So, yeah, a looooot of the time was put into building the product, refining it, getting bugs out of the way, testing it again, finding the same bugs...
Then there was marketing. Finding more clients, because we believed finding more people meant someone would buy the product.
PS: I was not completely full time, the developer was. In those 2 years, I have been freelancing (one needs to eat).
"The developer had no intention of being the project’s developer (?) he was not really a developer, he was a computer science graduate who owned a webdev shop and was used to managing, not coding." Heard this story so many times. Amazing how many people join a startup and don't want to do the actual work. Remember that scene in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg calls his outsource team about progress on that l…
I wonder how much their conversion was impacted by internationalisation problems. It looks like they were attempting to target the US, but their pricing page wasn't localised for that market. Unless they really were charging one thousand nine hundred and ninety dollars per team. Price is shown as £19,90 instead of $19.90 Also due to what I perceived as a thousand separator, not a decimal mark, I initially read the pr…
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You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments: 1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". 2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was…
To me it seems like recruiting of a developer worth anything, from scratch and without an existing team to help you to recruit or lure, must be much more difficult than getting an amazing idea or selling said amazing idea. Is that just because I never tried selling anything? Does anybody have examples of successful startups that proceeded in the way Sergio describes and became successful -- starting out with a busine…
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Damn Bluehost, hehe. I wish I knew how to fix it, but a few refreshes seems to go through.
I wouldn't blame your host, actually. It's WordPress. It's a shame it's so often given a free pass on these issues when it really isn't good at handling peaks in traffic.
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You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments: 1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". 2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was…
>>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the…
Definitely not. Unles your app is all about printing "Hello World" onscreen, you'll have to invest lots time to properly build the sketchiest of the apps. And this as long as programming is not the kind of thing that chokes you up.
Do people find it really ok to have video and a website spelling "try it free" and then have only an email input form ? I know that testing if demand exists is important, but doesn't it have adverse effect on your reputation to somehow lie to your prospects ?