Working full time in finance but want to create an app. Searching advice

Excuse me for this is my first time posting here.

I’m currently in my mid 20’s and have a few years of experience working on the finance side of real estate. I love the industry and will likely be transitioning into a private equity type role soon, but I have always loved the startup industry. One day I hope I can leverage my knowledge in real estate with prop tech.

But over the last year or so I’ve had this idea burning in the back of my mind that revolves around using social media and apps to get people to reconnect, in person, rather than online. It’s basically an idea that stems from the fact that social media is taking interactions online and reducing the quality of friendships. I want to leverage a technology platform where its easier and less burdensome to meet people face-to-face.

I don’t have a background in UX or CS, but have tried to self teach myself Python and Swift. I realized I will never be an expert soon, so I stopped. However, I’ve begun outlining a business plan for this app idea and begun drawing out sketches of what it may look like. I believe this could become something that’s not only highly profitable but also helps reverse the trend of human-to-human interactions going online, and deteriorating friendships.

I live in LA and I’m looking for advice on how I can take this idea and go running with it. I’m willing to spend a significant chunk of money but want to make sure I do it right. This is also considering I work 50-60 hours a week with my day job.

I would like to have a technical co founder or hire someone like a student local to LA who believes in the premise of the app as well. I’ve heard nightmare stories of people who go off and hire software engineers from Asia/East Europe that turn out to be utterly worthless. I’d rather take my time with this and have someone that I can work/hire directly with to develop.

Any suggestions or insight would be amazing. Thank you

2 comments

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Alex3917 7y ago ↗

Learning to code and building it yourself is by far the easiest path forward. Building a social app like this is a multi-decade long project, so spending an extra couple years upfront developing the technical skills isn't going to set the project back by a meaningful amount.

If you hire other folks to work for you, count on spending at least 500k per year for, say, 5 years until you app starts bringing in revenue. Unless you can self-fund it at that level, you're probably just going to lose whatever money you put into it.

wil999 7y ago ↗

Any great ideas I had before learning to code turned out to be not so great after learning how to code.

But bad ideas lead to better ideas. Learn to build small stuff first and gradually increasing the complexity. Make it fun and make it something you can enjoy.

Also most stuff can be done using the web stack now so I would encourage you to learn that instead of any other languages.