

Diamond in the Rough- Where to Find a Developer - jonahfriedl

The story sounds familiar. My name is Jonah and I&#x27;m a college student at Washington State university majoring in International Business. For the past several months, I have been working on launching an innovative advertising start-up that caters specifically to the college demographic. As any devoted entrepreneur, my idea keeps me up at night, gives me anxiety during the day, and distracts me from my school work week after week. Recently, my efforts have been focused around finding a talented developer that can build me a native app for ios. However, I don&#x27;t want just any developer working at large scale firm. No. I want a developer who shares my vision, gives creative input, and is as passionate about this project as I am. My question is, where do these individuals hide? I have exhausted my networking connections, explored my University resources, and even put ads out in college newspapers across the country. Yet for some reason, the right person hasn&#x27;t taken notice. I was wondering if anyone has suggestions on where to find a possible CTO? I realize entering into partnership with someone is a lot like marriage so obviously, I want to give myself and the project the best chances. I&#x27;m offering cash and equity so compensation isn&#x27;t the issue, I&#x27;m just looking for the right person.
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chrisbennet
From a developers perspective, we are often approached by entrepreneurs who
have an idea where gold _might_ be and if we (the developer) dig all the test
holes then gosh, we get to keep part of what we might find. It's not an
attractive proposition.

Things that would make such a deal more attractive:

\- the entrepreneur has has a track record of finding gold

\- the entrepreneur has already dug a lot of test holes and found some gold

\- the entrepreneur actually funds the operation instead of asking the
developer to "invest" 10s of thousands of dollars of development time

\- the entrepreneur believes in the idea so much that they will give the CTO
more equity than than he/she gets

These things are all hard for a college student to do. What you _can_ do is
try to learn coding enough to make a "minimum viable product" that proves
there is demand for your product. Yes, this is really hard but _business_ is
really hard.

Start-ups often "pivot" i.e. you start out with the idea to sell widgets but
you discover that people like the cool boxes they come in so you sell cool
boxes instead. This is one of the reasons that the original idea is not that
valuable - there is a good chance it will get abandoned by the time you are
done.

