Ask HN: I have a good idea for a startup, but I don't have time. What to do?

I think there is something you need to know: An idea is worth absolutely nothing, or very close to nothing. The money is a result of execution, a direct correlation even; The better the execution, the more money.

You stated: "I wonder the best way to handle partnerships, especially when the idea was basically entirely only one of the partners."

You should be wonder how you can find a partner who is willing to do all the work while you are off doing your own thing at school, with no time to spare. I am not kicking school, but if you're serious about an idea you would be willing to execute it. If a partner is doing all the work then he should be getting 90% of the assets, you should be MORE than happy to get 10% for your idea. As for finding the person to do all the work for you, good luck.

What I am trying to say, is a partnership is exactly that..a PARTnership. Meaning, you have to do part of the work, you can't just get someone to do all of the work and try and reap the rewards. The result, of course, will will be another falling out with yet another partner.

Give equity where equity is due and you will have your best chance at finding a co-founder. .

An alternative solution would be paying a developer to develop the project and pay him with the funds that you don't have. Remember borrowed money MUST be paid back if the venture fails.

My suggestion would be doing work on the side, if you have none then make some free time, and when you are at a percentage of completion you have a few options. You can demo the website to someone who may be willing to invest for X percentage, or you can find someone willing to co-found with you and do some of the work for X percentage of the venturet. The former has more risk associated as you are dealing with monetary involvement. The later, unless you promise compensation, has little risk as you are only involving someones time which they are contributing.

Best of luck

"An idea is worth absolutely nothing, or very close to nothing."

There are always people who say the opposite is also true. But unless you have at least a mockup, or a prototype, I agree that an idea don't have much value. The idea can be misleading without modeling of some kind.

I don't like either of those ideas. Problem is, if you don't have either time nor money to implement the idea yourself, why should a partner/freelancer implement it for you and then let you keep the profits?

If I were you, I'd do one of two things:

1. If you really believe in the idea, take a leave of absence from college and pursue it full-time. Build a prototype, put it out there, validate it, and then if it still looks like a good idea, enlist people to help. You'll have a much better bargaining position then anyway.

2. If you don't believe in the idea enough to do #1, put it up for adoption and let someone else run with it. Or just forget about it and let it die.

One of the hard lessons I've learned is that you can't serve two masters. I tried the volunteer-website-with-classes-on-the-side in college, and I tried the startup-on-the-side-with-a-full-time-job afterwards. With the former, I barely managed to graduate, and the website took far longer to do than it should've. With the latter, my job performance suffered and I found the code I wrote for the startup was so bad that I threw it all away and started fresh once I quit. If I come up with another good idea for a startup, the first thing I do (after validating it and making sure it's feasible) is to quit my job and pursue it all the way.

In summary: you need partners. Good ones. I failed to find any, and, like your first attempt, my startup burned out.

Working by yourself is just dangerous - even if you're entirely self-motivated (I'm not), you can only have so much perspective. Ever spent days trying to get some small thing to work because nobody was there to tell you it didn't matter? This goes much more if your project isn't a full time job - you need someone there to help you stay motivated. Heck, see paul Graham's #1 startup mistake:http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

On the other hand bad partners are even worse than nothing. Partnerships can go wrong in all kinds of ways - in my case I had someone who was big on talk but light on delivery. Doing the work I thought he was going to do took too much time, and my project was stillborn. Cool looking, somewhat functional, but with too many big issues to be usable. It needed another 6 months of polishing, and I didn't have 6 months of money left.

Never mind if your relationship should become actively hostile - nothing will kill things like a good round of lawsuits to waste your time and money. Of course, most startups never make enough money for that to be an issue. Also, having someone professional do your employment contracts (as I did) can help you avoid IP ambiguity.

It's hard to tell who will be a good partner and who won't, too. I'm still looking for someone to carry my project on with, since I do have all the IP. If anybody has figured it out, let me know.

I thought about freelancers, too. But I think for a startup you need someone genuinely invested. Someone who cares about the project - not just "give me my $X/hr., and I'm out the door". A startup requires more than that. A startup requires passion and commitment, something freelancers aren't exactly known for.

That's what was missing in my project. Somebody - else - who really was committed to making the project succeed. Somebody who'd sink huge amounts of their own money and/or time to get it off the ground.

Good luck - if somebody has a better idea for finding partners, I'm all ears.

I'd try to do it as a side project if at all possible. I've never gotten more side-projects done than when I was in college (and I went to a fairly work-intensive engineering school). If it helps, see if you can get credit by getting a faculty advisor and writing up some reports or papers about it.

Don't want to rain on your parade, but from your comments it looks like you are vastly underestimating the kind of commitment and effort that it takes to successfully take an idea to market.

No matter how good your idea is, you still need to be able to execute on it and bring it into reality.

You should go ahead and do it, if for no other reason than by the end of the experience you will have a much better idea of what you really need in order to get it done. I would say definitely do the code yourself, just so you can understand how much it would really cost to get someone else to do it. Hint: it's going to cost more than $500 to some guy in India.

This is almost ripe for a FAQ entry.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=774758

perhaps search for funding and use that process to hire a freelancer or find a committed cofounder?

beyond that, there's not any easy way for someone here to analyze your situation and tell you what choice is best, especially without knowing more about the project (i.e., how much development time would it take to produce a product, etc)