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Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

You sound like a great developer, but the reality is that you're an anomaly. Most developers suck, especially the ones on elance, rentacoder, etc. And if you're not technical, you have no idea how to figure out which ones suck. So I see this advice as being for non-technical folks who want to maximize their chance for success and limit their downside. And in that light, I think it succeeds.

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That and the fact solo founders or non technical people with an idea don't already have 10 or more consultants working for them.

But then isn't this all a recipe for disaster? If you need a piece of software to be written from scratch for you, then it's probably critical to your business. It may even literally be your business. Why in that case would you want to scrape by with a crappy coder and try and wield them to be effective? I think if that is the situation you end up in, you're better off not doing it at all.

Granted I've never done a start up, so maybe I'm just naive. But it seems like if you want to do a technical start up, you should be technically minded.

"If you need a piece of software to be written from scratch for you, then it's probably critical to your business."

G'lord, no! How much software is necessary for the minimum viable product of Groupon? Digg? TechCrunch? Facebook? Twitter? FourSquare? StackOverflow? Heck, we KNOW that Digg was outsourced, and that worked out okay. Many (maybe even MOST) startups true problem is marketing/UI/social rather than deep geekery. Many more can get by on half-assed engineering to prove out the initial assumptions and then just rewrite if they see a glimmer of success. Paul Buchheit has said that he rewrote chunks of Gmail quite a few times... It's not unusual.

There are plenty of startups where this would be a disaster but (as web apps get easier and cheaper to build) I think they are increasingly the exception rather than the rule.

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