Ask HN: How do you get people to do things without money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you get people to do things without money?

4 pointsdiminium6 comments

You have exactly $0 but have an idea you want to test but the idea is too complicated for you to work on alone. What do you do?

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Learn how to do it yourself - or at least get a good start so that when you present your idea to others they take you seriously (or at least more seriously than if you only have an idea). Ideas in themselves are worthless, it all comes down to execution.

I believe this is what Drew did with Dropbox and YC (if I'm not mistaken, in his application he said that he was going to follow through with Dropbox whether he got into YC or not). Granted, he is technical person, but (IMO) the simple fact that he was ready to finish his product, no matter what, showed a lot to the YC panel.

Local colleges have students willing to work on something for free as an internship (for college credit) that will help them hone their skills or give them experience. You might sort through several students to find the one with enough skills to hold their own in executing an idea, but there are definitely several diamonds in the rough there.

Some universities have classes that need real projects to work on too. If you get into a community college, there is probably a shortage of real projects for them to tackle while at a large university there will likely be a long waiting queue unless your idea is so above par (or you're famous or cool to work with) that a professor or dean moves it to the top of the queue.

If you're looking for more of a cofounder, there are websites or marketplaces for that: http://www.techcofounder.com/ or http://www.cofounderslab.com/ - I'm sure you can Google "find a cofounder" to find more.

Fake it.

Let's say your app is a marketplace of sorts. Your app need "buyers" to input data, store to a database, perform magic algorithm voodoo to find matches and then query "sellers" on the opposite side of the marketplace.

Don't do any of that to start.

Let a "buyer" input data, which is directly emailed to you. You then use your brain ("algorithm") to find matches and manually email those "sellers" manually with their matches. Further, don't program any of this. Use Wordpress for the site, WuFoo for the forms, etc etc.

People get way too hung up on the tech. Make everything as manual as possible to start, because that is the fastest way to realize your idea probably sucks (or, if you're lucky, only needs serious tweaking to make work)

The easiest thing to do is to sketch it on a piece of paper and show it to someone. Thats perhaps one of the most basic ways to validate a concept. I've read some stories where an entire app was sketched on paper and demonstrated to other people by moving around the pieces of paper. If people can easily grasp the idea, find people to partner with. There are a lot of great developers willing to contribute to a project if they see value. However, you will need to contribute something as well as an idea is worth $0. But if you have some talent (biz dev, design, etc.) that would be your contribution to it and it won't cost anything.

Even before building the product, I would suggest you validate that the idea is good in the first place. You can do that without creating any product at all and without depending on anyone else. It takes nothing more than creating a signup page and setting up adwords & analytics account. Look into this HN post - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3167676 and many other blog posts out there. Once you have validated that the idea is good, you might have an easier time convincing people to work with you.

Get people excited about it; start with what you actually can accomplish, show it off and then ask for help.

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