I haven't really thought of a skills exchange. It's an interesting concept though...
(
NOTE: for someone else who's looking for a startup idea -- there you have it: A marketplace for startup founders to exchange skills.
Skills / tasks are sold on a credit basis
Design a logo == 1 credit
Design a landing page from wireframe == 3 credits
Develop a membership backend == 5 credits
Earn credits by completing tasks for other founders using your own skills, then posts/purchase tasks for things you can't do yourself using those credits.
Monetize == let people just straight up buy credits if they don't want the hassle of helping other :)
Obviously that's not the idea I'm talking about in this thread -- just a freebee for someone who needs a new idea to noodle around with.
)
Anyway, in terms of your website People Lamp -- I don't think your skills would be a match for the scope of what I'm talking about, but one piece of initial advice: make sure your website loads with http://<url> and not just http://www.<url> ...
I agree that I should be looking for people who produce quality work, but I also think there's some flexibility to the 'interchangeable pieces' part of the argument.
Here's the thing: Building anything ends up being a very iterative process. From my personal experience, by the time one moves from the prototype/beta phase upwards of 90% of the original code/design base is thrown away, redone, etc. Since what I'm really looking for here is the first-cut that allows for the validation of the idea and the on-boarding of the first few (hundred-)thousand users, I think there could be some advantages to a little shorter-term thinking; if-and-only-if that means I'm able to deliver that first cut to market sooner than if I were to focus on the stability of the team upfront.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still wavering on my opinion of this (hence this entire thread). But I am really enjoying / appreciating the various methodologies.
I guess our experiences might vary with what happens to prototypes/first cut implementations.
From my experience what starts off as a simple proof of concept/prototype that is done quick and dirty to validate an idea, ends up being the actual production code. This is due in part to clients that come and say: "well it works, why rewrite it? you can just fix bugs if they come up", making you have to maintain what was originally meant to be a throw away implementation.
While right now your intentions might be to rewrite, I do believe that you might reconsider this decision once you have a couple hundred users to please, who all want new features or bugs fixed. Now I do not know what your idea is and how critical time to market is for you but I would recommend that you consider removing non-essential features to get it out quicker rather than skipping quality.
1. I totally agree and am always ready to leave the day job. I guess what I'm looking at here is the optimal way to get to the quit-job state. I'm not the best developer, so quitting to take on that responsibility seems counter productive ... Leave a job that pays well, allows me some freedom to invest in others working towards my goal - just so that I can devote all my time to work that I'll never be the best at / other would do a better job of ... Part of the problem here is likely the fact that I should probably be in a "non-technical" cofounder role, but I just happen to have enough technical founder skills that prevent me from embracing that approach whole-heartedly.
I'm really trying to find the best balance of risk/reward here -- while accelerating the timeline as much as possible.
2. I'm at the dayjob - so, technicall my time on HN is helping finance the upcoming project... (note to those who work with/for me / are quite possibly reading this: -- this was a lunch break post & you all know I run a number of side projects -- don't get too scared that I'm leaving tomorrow...)
Yeah, that's absolutely what I've done in the past / will do again if I head this route. (Truthfully speaking though, with the time limits, it was the ruthlessly stripped down version that took me 9 month). As I said, I'm a competent hacker, but even full-time, I'm nowhere near my dev friends and designer friends who breeze through some of the data structure design aspects I'd end up meddling with for a week ...
Could you talk more about that project? I can imagine some projects that would take at least 9 months to make a beta happen (Space travel), but I can't really imagine a stripped-down-to-the-core software business that takes 9 months for a beta. (Was it financial?)
I have had a similar issue hitting bottlenecks in developing an app that would've benefited tremendously from a domain expert. I now think that a good approach would be to hire out that specific part on odesk.com or other freelancing site.
Would love that info - at least it would give me some concrete examples of what's available. I definitely have a budget -- willing to invest in the idea & no longer a starving student, so I certainly wouldn't want to be going the rock-bottom cheap route. Thanks.
I know of a company that works more like extending your engineering team, it's called Nearsoft, they have presence in the valley so if you live around I can drop you the contact info of one of the founders and help schedule a coffee meeting or something informal just to get to know how they work.
I recommend you them because they have several startups as their clients, some small other big so they could probably be a good fit.
I'll keep it there as this is starting to sound like an advert, so I'll leave my email: chadruva@hotmail.com
I'm actually in Toronto, Canada (closest I got to the valley was an invite to the YC interview round almost 6 years ago now ...), but I'll reach out via email because I would absolutely love to hear more.
Yeah, that's been my approach in the past, but I'm definitely questioning that approach right now. Founding at this stage in life is definitely more difficult. In my early twenties, I dropped out of school, working 19hrs a day and was able to produce a prototype for what would become my full-time business for the subsequent 10 years in a matter of a few months ... But with my last startup, I worked every night from about 10pm-1:30am + "nap time" on weekends, and what should have been 1-2 months of work turned into 9 - with way more compromises than there should have been. Plus, the time spent tweaking the code actually limited the time I spent on some of the critical business / positioning decisions.
(A few times I actually rented a hotel in my city just to sequester myself and jump start the dev process)
In terms of elance/odesk, yes, I thought that would be a sketchy approach. I was actually more interested in production houses (like the kinds that build full-on apps) and contracting them. I've done similar in my day job, but in that case, they weren't so much building the business for us, but just building a marketing hook or an app extension to our core offering. I'm a little more skeptical about using them to build the whole thing...
The final approach I was considering was simply hiring my first employee as a work-from-home employee/cofounder. I'm wondering if anyone has ever been in this role, how they found it and if/where things went wrong with the "non-technical" cofounder? (I'm calling myself non-technical simply because I wouldn't be playing the role of developer -- I am in fact technical ...)
I see two big trends in building apps/sites/businesses these days.
If your product is tech light (eg. groupon) you can build an MVP relatively quickly and on your own
If your product is tech heavy (eg. fusion reaction analytics at power plants) you will probably need to quit your job and find a skilled team (and maybe some investment).
It's built for integration (linear in-transform-out types of operation), but internally we've used it to create webservice APIs, create the wiki mentioned above, serve up HTML and pretty much anything else you can imagine.
