Ask HN: Non-tech solo founder scored $100k to develop product. Finding a dev?
Long-time reader, first-time poster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Suggestions on how to proceed?
Edit: If anyone wants to reach out to me, you can get me at rexfaraday at gmail dot com
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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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?