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Ask HN: I have a good idea. Now what?

12 points by hcurtiss ↗ HN
I'm sure this has been answered before, but I'm having a hard time finding the right search terms. I have a good idea for a startup and a little money to get it off the ground. Question is, how do I find a designer/developer to build the website? Can I just hire a web developer, or do I have to offer them a piece of the action?

11 comments

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[dead] techn_in
you're always free to _hire_ a web developer, people are definitely willing to work if you're paying them. Most people don't have the resources to do that at least initially, though, which is why it's usually hard to find good people to work for equity.
mindcrime
I'm sure this has been answered before

Something like that...

http://www.quora.com/How-do-you-develop-an-idea-into-a-start...

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-get-an-idea-dev...

http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-way-to-build-and-execute...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199825

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Can I just hire a web developer, or do I have to offer them a piece of the action?

You can setup whatever kind of arrangement you can negotiate with someone. Just hiring somebody straight up, no equity stake involved, is certainly one option. Whether or not it's the best option depends on a lot of things. Is this idea something you see growing into "The Next Big Thing" ala Facebook? If so, you might want one or more actual co-founders to help get things going. Or is this just some "4 hour work week" inspired idea to bring in a few hundred bucks a month of passive income? If it's the latter, it might be best to just pay to have the development done.

The other option, in any case, is to buckle down, learn to code, and do it yourself. Actually, taking a stab at doing it yourself, first, might not be a bad idea period. If you do hire somebody, whatever you do can act as a prototype, proof-of-concept, whatever, and help whoever you do hire, to understand exactly what it is you want. Same for talking to potential co-founders, investors, etc. A demo you hacked up yourself is better than nothing, or just a powerpoint deck.

If you don't code at all currently, go pickup a Groovy on Grails, or Ruby on Rails, book or tutorial and give it a whirl.

hcurtiss
The quora links are great. Thanks, man.

I'm a young attorney. While I'd say I'm among the more tech savy attorneys around, that's not saying much in the HN community. While I have plenty of money to get a site designed/developed, and money enough to fly around talking to investors, I intend to keep my day job as long as possible. Though I think it would be fun, I simply don't have the time to learn a programming language. Hopefully I won't need to.

senko
First, validate your idea. Do you think it's good, or do you have people outside your circle of friends and family saying it's good (and ideally, telling you they'd use/pay for it)?

If not, that's your first step: http://swombat.com/2010/12/20/how-to-validate-a-startup-idea

If you're beyond this, hire someone to make a minimum viable product (MVP). You can either pay somene's market price (odesk, elance, forrst and similar are okay places to find'em, although be careful in selecting/vetting the people), or offer them some partnership. In the latter case, keep in mind you're asking them to invest in your idea - you have to convince them (why) your idea is good and that you can execute on the business side (or whichever angle you'd be covering).

And whatever you do, please don't try the "do it for free, there will be more work coming" or "it's going to look good in your portfolio" route.

sidmitra
1. Your idea is just a hypothesis at this point. So goto http://unbounce.com, sign up and put up a landing page that describes your idea. A lot of people are worried about people stealing their ideas. But imagine if there's a guy that is smart enough to understand, adapt, build, execute, market, scale your idea... then he probably has hundreds of his own ideas jotted down somewhere on his eternally long TODO list.

2. Throw some ad words and redirect to your landing page(saying Coming Soon etc.). See if anyone is even willing to leave you their email address. If not then move on to the next idea.

3. Iterate on your landing page, some people even take a survey of potential features. Find a reasonable product/market fit.

4. Then make some rough mockups explaining your idea.

5. Then hire someone to do it, but you need to put in the same amount of time as the dev/designer. So beware!, quite a lot of outsourced work fails because the client isn't as invested in his idea, and wants someone else to fill in the gaps. You can decide on paying someone or offering equity. But to be honest, you won't find good devs interested in equity right now. The market is in a boom, so your idea better have a definite appeal to the dev.

If you need help with Step 5, ping me at http://www.sidmitra.com :-)

hcurtiss
Thanks for the input. I've thought about unbounce, but as you guessed, I'm a little reluctant to share the idea. The barrier to entry is fairly low. Success will depend on the domain name (which I have) and the relationships with certain third parties (which I'm developing). My idea isn't one that will require a terribly sophisticated back-end. The tech is all pretty straight forward. My thinking is that if I do it well, and affiliate with large national organizations, that it will gain momentum others won't be able to easily replicate. For that reason, I'll probably require confidentiality agreements from third parties involved until launch.

Is there some reason I should change my approach?

petervandijck
Yes, two reasons. Confidentiality agreements a) will drive a lot of really good people away, and b) will make you believe in your idea even more, when you should be doubting it and poking holes in it and testing its assumptions.

b) is the bigger reason.

poissonpie
if you can get away with a very small MVP to test the idea out, then why not try something like http://www.weekendhacker.net - I realise you don't want to share the actual idea if it is fairly simple, but hey, you could word it a little obtusely.

You can, of course just hire a web developer - some advice from Derek Sivers http://sivers.org/how2hire