

Ask HN: Non-tech solo founder scored $100k to develop product. Finding a dev? - thrownaway

Long-time reader, first-time poster.<p>Thanks to HN and several other forums on the web, I've cobbled together a business that makes me about $5k-7/month. I'm not seeing a whole lot of growth in demand for my product, but one of my sales tools (a twist on a common tool that I faked together in PHP despite having no engineering background) always gets a very positive response and closes me a lot of sales at prices way above typical for products like mine.<p>The space I'm in is a sexy, popular space.  Can't say what it is, but lots of people want to work in it.<p>Recently I heard about a prestigious grant contest for businesses in my space and applied.  To my pleasant surprise, I've recently learned I'm being awarded $100k specifically to further develop the sales tool I cooked up (sorry for the intentionally vague language) so I can offer it to other businesses in my space who sell products like the one I've been selling.<p>This seems like a pretty good idea.  To use an obvious allusion, I've been mining gold with middling success, but while doing so, I unwittingly invented a really kickass shovel.  Eventually I learned that my shovels were in fact awesome and now I've got some capital to develop and sell these shovels to other miners at scale so they can make a better go of it.<p>Here's my problem.  To really capitalize on this windfall I need someone who can actually hack.  I don't know the first thing about creating a web app that scales.  Unfortunately, I live in a remote area and there aren't a lot of programmers around here. Furthermore, I've never hired a developer before so I suspect any job posting I put up would be a big turn-off to the sort of person I'd want to work with.  I read all the posts on here making fun of bad job listings and they make me really paranoid.<p>Suggestions on how to proceed?<p>Edit: If anyone wants to reach out to me, you can get me at rexfaraday at gmail dot com
======
holdenc
Here's some advice from a fellow non-developer who was once your shoes 5 years
ago (sans grant money) with similar revenues and skills...

Since you've managed to cobble yourself together a prototype in PHP that
people will actually pay for there's a good chance you can take it to the next
level, albeit slowly, with a couple books in your lap and a few long days. I
suggest you challenge yourself to figure out what is the next step you need
help with and figure it out yourself. Unless you are looking at some very
unique problem solving chances are you can do this.

Funny story: when I started coding my web app that supports myself and my
family I had never created a database or re-usable objects. I ended up with
huge pages of procedural PHP code and a primitive denormalized database,
because I didn't really know any better. I've managed to scale this old code
across two servers, and while it's pretty horrid, making changes and
troubleshooting is a breeze because it's all mine.

~~~
thrownaway
Thank you for the encouragement. What you wrote out here, is what I've been
doing for the last year or so. I had some good friends tell me to just man up
and figure out how to make what I thought would help sell my stuff. So I did.
Were it not for this grant money, I'd keep on trucking along making
incremental improvements to my business. Maybe in a year I'd get up to
9-10k/month. I suspect it's quite do-able.

But with this funding, there's an opportunity to do something grander while
still running my little business on the side. That's new territory for me.

~~~
jacquesm
If you don't follow the GPs advise then contract out little pieces and do the
integration yourself. No point in setting yourself up to be ripped off, you
have a winning formula, be careful.

------
petervandijck
Finding a good developer is hard, especially since you're (it sounds like) not
technical enough to evaluate their work. So here's a suggestion:

1\. Take 20,000, and hire 4 developers for 5,000 each for, say, a few weeks of
work. Have them build the SAME product. At the end of the few weeks, evaluate
who you like better. There will be likely someone who stands out. Hire them.

2\. Take 40,000, and build the product. Launch it. Keep removing features
until you can build it for this amount.

3\. Now after (and only after) you've launched, take customer feedback, and
spend the next 40,000 finetuning the product.

There are of course also other ways to go about this :)

~~~
petervandijck
Also, being up-front about your limitations will make developers like you
more.

And also, make a spec with Balsamiq, just mock up the main screens. Do NOT
write a long Word document spec.

------
gizmo
Congrats on the grant and the business! $5k+ a month is a really good start.

Try the HN contractors list. Lots of skilled people on there.

[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clVJYi0yYVBka181Z0ZKRW9kQ0E&hl=en)

~~~
amk
I added myself to this sheet. Hope you don't mind.

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NickNYC242
What's that fishy smell? Someone gave you $100k for vaporware and didn't ask
about your team or code? This seems a little off to me. Without revealing any
info on your product why don't you explain your grant, who gave it to you, and
provide the info you pitched to gain the grant? That can't be proprietary to
the point where it exposes your tech, right?

~~~
retroryan
I am going to second the fish smell. Google his email address and you find a
twitter account the tweets the best craigs list w4m, wtf with that? How can
you have time to run a valid business while combing craigs list for garbage.

~~~
thrownaway
Good catch. Just deactivated that and a bunch of others. I set up a bunch of
Twitter bots one night. Not my finest moment.

------
chrischen2
Just wanted to point out that this doesn't seem to be his first post (maybe he
forgot): <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=823325>. If it means anything, I still
personally think he's legit.

Oh and I'm guessing it's a porn site.

~~~
joubee
so i found his deleted twitter account cached here:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cskPmCG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cskPmCG9t4EJ:twitter.com/secondcitysex+rexfaraday&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz&client=firefox-a)

I'm guessing porn also :)

------
rubyrescue
sounds like 100k is a lot more than you need for a solid version 1 if you
cobbled together a tool with no programming skills.

1\. write a 1 page summary of the product and feature set, with the
requirements above. be detailed enough to cover the requirements; you can
still make this document pretty vague if you're worried about disclosure but
you're going to have to reveal the product at some point - i wouldn't sweat it
too much as you're not going to be posting this around the web.

2\. make a list of requirements, one to two sentences for each feature; put
requirements into buckets - priority 1,2,3. focus on building the pri 1
features in the first version. _be ruthless about keeping this feature set
small_. don't say things like "iphone client" - that's too big - more like "a
web client dashboard with my sales funnel, with ability to sort, filter, and
query". then describe what type of filtering, querying, etc in separate
requirements. then "an iphone view of my sales funnel with a simplified list
of fields", "ability to respond to emails via the iphone client", etc.

with this summary and list of high level requirements, you can start
soliciting developers and getting feedback on how hard it will be to build;
you could try odesk/elance but i'd stay away from those because they're better
for finding lone wolves and not cohesive teams. if you do use them, don't pick
the cheapest people - there are some other threads on HN about how to do it
successfully.

you will learn a LOT by seeing how your potential developers respond to this
"RFP" - if they have detailed feedback, ask good clarifying questions, and can
point to similar projects and have anecdotes of what made past projects work,
then you're on the right track.

i both bid on and subcontract work and i've found that i can tell very quickly
by the questions a potential developer asks whether the project will be
successful. with this budget you don't want to hire a solo guy but be wary of
the teams where the BD/sales guy promises a lot but doesn't seem to be adding
a lot of value - it's better to work with teams where all the members are
technical and participating in the actual end result.

actually, there are some people i could possibly recommend, email me.

------
qeorge
Couple of tips:

1) Look for people who are good writers (prose and such). They tend to be good
communicators.

2) Look for programmers who admit their areas of weakness.

3) As always, you're probably worrying about scaling way too early.

Best of luck, and congrats on the grant!

~~~
lsc
good advice.

Also, use standard tools. If you have cobbled together, badly written
php/MySQL, there are armies of SysAdmins (like me) who can come in and do
relatively easy things without touching the code much to make it scale better.
If you use something new and weird, well, you had better hope your tech guy
sticks around, and is good enough to make it scale, because he'll be hard to
replace.

I've worked at several places where 1. the founder cooks up something that is
revision number four thousand on a pile of php/MySQL spaghetti that was
originally intended to do something else, but this time it finally gets
customers. 2. the guy hires me to prop the thing up while he hires a compitent
developer to re-write the thing in a scalable, maintainable manner, 3. they
switch to the new code base, I get bored and leave.

going from step 2 to step 3 often takes a few tries. Don't get too
discouraged.

------
Tichy
If a Nigerian scammer was out to get the HN crowd, what you wrote would be a
good start. Not that I think you are scamming, just found the similarity
amusing.

------
SkyMarshal
Hello, I am Prince Narwhad of Nigeria. I am a developer PHP too. For small sum
$100,000 US I will be happily developing your application for you. Just send
money to account in your email, and response to this message with a file with
your source code in it. I will make millions.. er make _you_ millions.

Sincerely,

Prince Narhwad.

------
terpua
You may want to post here: <http://helpastartupout.com/>

Here's a dev looking for a project:
[http://helpastartupout.com/2010/05/16/tech-team-looking-
for-...](http://helpastartupout.com/2010/05/16/tech-team-looking-for-
ideasprojects/)

~~~
jules
That site triggers my "parked domain"-detector.

------
hundredwatt
I'm working on a project that is directed at helping people like you. I would
love to get your feedback on the ideas I have and believe that they may help
you out in the process. You can reach me via email at <my hn username> at
gmail dot com.

------
Murkin
Had similar experience with a friend. He got a product up and running but then
his tech co-founder had to quit (personal reasons).

He reached out to me, and I connected him with a very good and experience web-
developer (who had a full time job).

The web-dev went with him on a couple of interviews to help screen out
potential devs and later did some followup on the project in the first few
weeks.

Not sure what kind of deal they cooked-up between them. But finding an expert
you can trust, that has a bit of time to advise and help you, might be a good
idea.

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noelchurchill
What's with all these "i just got a lot of money" posts written by new
profiles only a couple hours old??

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njl
I might be willing to help you develop your tool; I'd need to hear more. I'd
definitely be willing to help you screen developers, or even help you write
your advertisement.

njl@njl.us

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famfam
I think I speak for everyone here when I say, I'm dying to at least know what
general domain you're working in. Please please please spill.

------
pinksoda
Got AIM or Gmail? Leave some contact info so developers can contact you.

~~~
thrownaway
I've added my contact info to the top post at the end. Thanks.

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hndevel
email me: hndevel@gmail.com

I'm an experienced Rails developer in the Bay Area.

~~~
zefhous
Why are you posting from a throw-away account? What's wrong with identifying
yourself?

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RailsTeam
Hi, we can help you out. we develop internet applications for startups and new
age enterprise using Ruby on Rails. We can surely develop something for you
quickly. visit our website <http://www.railsteam.com>

cheers, Chirag

