Show HN: Kitify, my first Rails project. And some advice for non-tech founders
I'd love to get HN's feedback on Kitify (http://kitify.com), a new service I built. Kitify makes it easy for DIY project writers to document, share and sell kits for their projects. I built Kitify because DIY is fun and a great way to learn, but actually getting the parts together for many projects is a pain; I want to solve that.
This is my first Rails project. I knew how to write simple PHP scripts before this, but I had no exposure to Rails - or MVC or, actually, anything meaningfully involving objects. I had the idea for Kitify months ago, but wasn't able to move it forward with the knowledge I had.
What really helped was finding a great, smart developer and asking him to write just the basic outline of the app and answer questions about it. I don't mean "rails new", I mean a working version with almost no features but with Bootstrap, useful gems, JS utility functions, models/views/controllers in the general direction of what I would eventually need. (Thank you @reedlauber!)
This was affordable and time-efficient, and gave me enough momentum to start learning and building. I highly recommend this approach for non-dev founders who are intimidated by modern web frameworks but who are having trouble finding a technical cofounder.
My bonus advice for people in b-school is that, if you are working on an idea that may be perceived as "niche", you will probably have to build version 1 yourself, even if you don't know anything about coding. HTML, CSS and basic JS / PHP can be learned quickly, and you definitely have time to do this. Then you should follow the advice I outlined above.
Thanks for reading! I'd love hear any feedback on the idea, where I should go with it, user experience, etc.