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Get a co-founder

sacstarts.com

15 pointscalebgilbert9 comments

Freelancers or outside firms can’t possibly deliver what you want because they don’t actually care about the product or the outcome

Actually that's not true. A lot of freelancers I know are very proud of and attached to the projects they work on.

Might be true for some others, like some of the overseas firms you'll find on elance who crank out insane amounts of code, but for individual freelancers my experience has been that they care a great deal about what they work on.

How you pick a freelancer/outsource makes a big difference too. When I am looking to hire a freelancer I don't post a project, I go out and look at code that people have produced (open source) that are similar in function/scope/language/whatever and contact them to see if they are interested.

Certainly with any generality, there's exceptions. But if you are a guy with an idea and don't have the ability to build it, you're unlikely to be satisfied with the outcome of hiring a freelancer.

Freelancers are not employees. They're not attached to the business on a full time basis, and while they may get excited by the business and be happy to be working with the entrepreneur, in the end they are mercenaries.

Further, when the project is over and they walk away, the knowledge behind your product and technology walks away with them. This is true of employees as well to some extent, but at least with employees there's an expectation that they will be involved for a long term. For them it's not just another contract.

Contractors can be used to augment your development staff, but should never be your entire development staff.

Sure, you CAN have a success with a product built by freelancers (Digg is an example of this) but it is very, very rare.

He suggests to give only 30% to the guy who's going to build the entire product? Sounds cheap.

Wouldn't it be awkward to use the dating analogy if the two founders were of the opposite sex, or homosexual? It feels as if people assume startups are for guys looking for other guys, and this way of thinking further discourages girls from getting into the game. So I dunno, good idea to stop using dating analogies?

A business partnership is a relationship. It's certainly not a romantic relationship, but it can be just as intense and emotional as a romantic relationship.

No one is suggesting that potential business partners take each other out to the movies. But it's a good idea that they spend a lot of time together and get to know each other well before jumping into a partnership together.

That's why the analogy works. You don't meet someone at a party and marry them the next day. You shouldn't meet someone at an event and make them your co-founder immediately either.

I know it works, but I'm saying isn't it a bit awkward to use on a guy and a girl if they aren't dating?

No one is saying the two people ARE dating and marrying. They're saying the process of finding a co-founder is LIKE dating and marrying.

That's what an analogy is. "a⋅nal⋅o⋅gy - a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based"

And the awkwardness comes in because not everyone is keyed in to the analogy. It can be easily misconstrued as the two people are dating. For two guys however it's less awkward because people naturally seek another explanation for the term dating first. But for some people they could jump to the romantic term for dating, and knowing this is why it can be seen as awkward even to just some people.

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