Ask HN: Non-tech solo founder scored $100k to develop product. Finding a dev?

Here's some advice from a fellow non-developer who was once your shoes 5 years ago (sans grant money) with similar revenues and skills...

Since you've managed to cobble yourself together a prototype in PHP that people will actually pay for there's a good chance you can take it to the next level, albeit slowly, with a couple books in your lap and a few long days. I suggest you challenge yourself to figure out what is the next step you need help with and figure it out yourself. Unless you are looking at some very unique problem solving chances are you can do this.

Funny story: when I started coding my web app that supports myself and my family I had never created a database or re-usable objects. I ended up with huge pages of procedural PHP code and a primitive denormalized database, because I didn't really know any better. I've managed to scale this old code across two servers, and while it's pretty horrid, making changes and troubleshooting is a breeze because it's all mine.

This is really inspiring. I think it's a mix of your determination to learn how to code and the line of "... The web app that supports my family". Maybe op can get someone to help them building the app with the 100k grant, but I'd certainly suggest they learn themselves too.

Thank you for the encouragement. What you wrote out here, is what I've been doing for the last year or so. I had some good friends tell me to just man up and figure out how to make what I thought would help sell my stuff. So I did. Were it not for this grant money, I'd keep on trucking along making incremental improvements to my business. Maybe in a year I'd get up to 9-10k/month. I suspect it's quite do-able.

But with this funding, there's an opportunity to do something grander while still running my little business on the side. That's new territory for me.

If you don't follow the GPs advise then contract out little pieces and do the integration yourself. No point in setting yourself up to be ripped off, you have a winning formula, be careful.

Finding a good developer is hard, especially since you're (it sounds like) not technical enough to evaluate their work. So here's a suggestion:

1. Take 20,000, and hire 4 developers for 5,000 each for, say, a few weeks of work. Have them build the SAME product. At the end of the few weeks, evaluate who you like better. There will be likely someone who stands out. Hire them.

2. Take 40,000, and build the product. Launch it. Keep removing features until you can build it for this amount.

3. Now after (and only after) you've launched, take customer feedback, and spend the next 40,000 finetuning the product.

There are of course also other ways to go about this :)

Also, being up-front about your limitations will make developers like you more.

And also, make a spec with Balsamiq, just mock up the main screens. Do NOT write a long Word document spec.

Congrats on the grant and the business! $5k+ a month is a really good start.

Try the HN contractors list. Lots of skilled people on there.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...

Thanks! I'll give it a look.

I added myself to this sheet. Hope you don't mind.

What's that fishy smell? Someone gave you $100k for vaporware and didn't ask about your team or code? This seems a little off to me. Without revealing any info on your product why don't you explain your grant, who gave it to you, and provide the info you pitched to gain the grant? That can't be proprietary to the point where it exposes your tech, right?

I'm upvoting you for asking good questions.

-Not vaporware. I have a prototype I've been using to sell my own products. That's how I make $5k/month right now. The problem is that there's no way anyone other than me could use the code I cobbled together to do what I do. Heck, it's a pain for me for me to do it. I have to edit a few text files and swap some arrays around each time I make a sale.

-Team. This is a good point. Had I applied to something like Y-Combinator they would have said to come back when I have some technical founders. The organization providing this grant does not have that sort of dev-centric culture however, so they did not ask this.

That's really as detailed as I feel comfortable getting. I've changed a few details in my post to further protect folks, but the facts are more or less as they're stated.

I am going to second the fish smell. Google his email address and you find a twitter account the tweets the best craigs list w4m, wtf with that? How can you have time to run a valid business while combing craigs list for garbage.

Good catch. Just deactivated that and a bunch of others. I set up a bunch of Twitter bots one night. Not my finest moment.

Just wanted to point out that this doesn't seem to be his first post (maybe he forgot): http://hackerne.ws/item?id=823325. If it means anything, I still personally think he's legit.

Oh and I'm guessing it's a porn site.

so i found his deleted twitter account cached here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cskPmCG...

I'm guessing porn also :)

If a Nigerian scammer was out to get the HN crowd, what you wrote would be a good start. Not that I think you are scamming, just found the similarity amusing.

Couple of tips:

1) Look for people who are good writers (prose and such). They tend to be good communicators.

2) Look for programmers who admit their areas of weakness.

3) As always, you're probably worrying about scaling way too early.

Best of luck, and congrats on the grant!

good advice.

Also, use standard tools. If you have cobbled together, badly written php/MySQL, there are armies of SysAdmins (like me) who can come in and do relatively easy things without touching the code much to make it scale better. If you use something new and weird, well, you had better hope your tech guy sticks around, and is good enough to make it scale, because he'll be hard to replace.

I've worked at several places where 1. the founder cooks up something that is revision number four thousand on a pile of php/MySQL spaghetti that was originally intended to do something else, but this time it finally gets customers. 2. the guy hires me to prop the thing up while he hires a compitent developer to re-write the thing in a scalable, maintainable manner, 3. they switch to the new code base, I get bored and leave.

going from step 2 to step 3 often takes a few tries. Don't get too discouraged.

Hello, I am Prince Narwhad of Nigeria. I am a developer PHP too. For small sum $100,000 US I will be happily developing your application for you. Just send money to account in your email, and response to this message with a file with your source code in it. I will make millions.. er make you millions.

Sincerely,

Prince Narhwad.

You may want to post here: http://helpastartupout.com/

Here's a dev looking for a project: http://helpastartupout.com/2010/05/16/tech-team-looking-for-...

That site triggers my "parked domain"-detector.

I'm working on a project that is directed at helping people like you. I would love to get your feedback on the ideas I have and believe that they may help you out in the process. You can reach me via email at <my hn username> at gmail dot com.

sounds like 100k is a lot more than you need for a solid version 1 if you cobbled together a tool with no programming skills.

1. write a 1 page summary of the product and feature set, with the requirements above. be detailed enough to cover the requirements; you can still make this document pretty vague if you're worried about disclosure but you're going to have to reveal the product at some point - i wouldn't sweat it too much as you're not going to be posting this around the web.

2. make a list of requirements, one to two sentences for each feature; put requirements into buckets - priority 1,2,3. focus on building the pri 1 features in the first version. _be ruthless about keeping this feature set small_. don't say things like "iphone client" - that's too big - more like "a web client dashboard with my sales funnel, with ability to sort, filter, and query". then describe what type of filtering, querying, etc in separate requirements. then "an iphone view of my sales funnel with a simplified list of fields", "ability to respond to emails via the iphone client", etc.

with this summary and list of high level requirements, you can start soliciting developers and getting feedback on how hard it will be to build; you could try odesk/elance but i'd stay away from those because they're better for finding lone wolves and not cohesive teams. if you do use them, don't pick the cheapest people - there are some other threads on HN about how to do it successfully.

you will learn a LOT by seeing how your potential developers respond to this "RFP" - if they have detailed feedback, ask good clarifying questions, and can point to similar projects and have anecdotes of what made past projects work, then you're on the right track.

i both bid on and subcontract work and i've found that i can tell very quickly by the questions a potential developer asks whether the project will be successful. with this budget you don't want to hire a solo guy but be wary of the teams where the BD/sales guy promises a lot but doesn't seem to be adding a lot of value - it's better to work with teams where all the members are technical and participating in the actual end result.

actually, there are some people i could possibly recommend, email me.

Had similar experience with a friend. He got a product up and running but then his tech co-founder had to quit (personal reasons).

He reached out to me, and I connected him with a very good and experience web-developer (who had a full time job).

The web-dev went with him on a couple of interviews to help screen out potential devs and later did some followup on the project in the first few weeks.

Not sure what kind of deal they cooked-up between them. But finding an expert you can trust, that has a bit of time to advise and help you, might be a good idea.

What's with all these "i just got a lot of money" posts written by new profiles only a couple hours old??

I might be willing to help you develop your tool; I'd need to hear more. I'd definitely be willing to help you screen developers, or even help you write your advertisement.

njl@njl.us

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, I'm dying to at least know what general domain you're working in. Please please please spill.

Got AIM or Gmail? Leave some contact info so developers can contact you.

I've added my contact info to the top post at the end. Thanks.

email me: hndevel@gmail.com

I'm an experienced Rails developer in the Bay Area.

Why are you posting from a throw-away account? What's wrong with identifying yourself?

Hi, we can help you out. we develop internet applications for startups and new age enterprise using Ruby on Rails. We can surely develop something for you quickly. visit our website http://www.railsteam.com

cheers, Chirag