Reading my original post I did make it sound like i'm looking at it the wrong way. I do work on a lot of personal projects and have learned a lot more than just by reading the books. I can actually write a decent app, I've written RSS parsers, a threaded comment system, an online ticketing system for my roomate's entrepreneurship project (no payment processing though), and right now i'm working on a CRM system.
We're planning to launch the CRM system soon and market it to our specific industry and i've actually learned a lot over the time i've been coding in my free time, I just feel like I don't have the skills the be hired on as a programmer at startup.
I'm leaning more towards finding a personal project that has big potential and build a prototype using my PHP skills. If it catches on I figured I could then find a more experienced programmer that could optimize the code and make it scale as the user base grows. I feel like I could use my skills as a founder and then bring in some awesome programmers to refine and enhance my app rather than getting hired as a programmer.
We're planning to launch the CRM system soon and market it to our specific industry and i've actually learned a lot over the time i've been coding in my free time, I just feel like I don't have the skills the be hired on as a programmer at startup.
I'm leaning more towards finding a personal project that has big potential and build a prototype using my PHP skills. If it catches on I figured I could then find a more experienced programmer that could optimize the code and make it scale as the user base grows. I feel like I could use my skills as a founder and then bring in some awesome programmers to refine and enhance my app rather than getting hired as a programmer.