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Ideas are almost worthless, but getting people to believe in ideas is not. Go prove it to yourself and get a developer to believe in your potential company. If

Ideas are almost worthless, but getting people to believe in ideas is not. Go prove it to yourself and get a developer to believe in your potential company. If you believe in it truly, go and borrow and pay a top notch developer and have full ownership. If you only think you truly believe in it, but on second look you are concerned about borrowing money to invest in it, then try to find a developer. Speak with conviction and maybe you will get them to quit their $100,000 job and invest their time for a huge amount of equity - maybe you keep 20% if it's a great idea or less if it's not. The real truth is if it's --- "easy for big, already established companies to replicate it in a heartbeat".. You really don't have a chance if you can't program. You need more than code. You need a whole infrastructure of people to scale and without being a programmer yourself, you will have difficulty getting talent to work for you and maybe even difficulty recognizing who is actually good.

spiffyman 10y ago
It's important to note that you can often "go prove it to yourself and get a developer to believe in your potential company" without coding a thing. For example, a non-technical friend that I'd worked with a few times came to me last year with an idea. I wasn't looking to jump ship from my current gig, but I was happy to advise him as he ramped up. We took his idea and boiled it down to some minimal questions that needed to be answered. From there, he manually simulated the product: he manually gathered data from publicly available sources, manually dumped them into the tech he intended to use for some analysis, manually evaluated the results, etc. The result? In less than two weeks' time, we figured out that he actually had a decent idea going. Over beers, I sketched for him a general outline of how I'd automate the process -- nothing too detailed, nothing getting into the weeds, but I was able to give him an outline and say "here is where you've got some risk" or "this part's easy." He shopped that around to a few folks, some of whom I was able to recommend to him, and ended up finding a technical cofounder. That guy threw everything I'd suggested away and went with another stack, but that's not the important part. What matters is that my buddy a) had proof that the thing could work, and b) had clearly done some due diligence in figuring out the initial development needs. That made him more attractive to technical people and led to his landing that technical cofounder. So I'd advise you to: 1. Think hard about how much what you're doing needs any code at all. 2. Anything you can do manually, you should go ahead and do just to prove things out to yourself and, later, to potential cofounders. 3. Find a friend or a friendly face at a local meetup who'd be willing to advise -- don't ask for anything more. 4. Use the outputs of these processes to either a) decide not to go forward with it, because that's what you may learn, or b) pitch technical people. Good luck!

spiffyman 10y ago

It's important to note that you can often "go prove it to yourself and get a developer to believe in your potential company" without coding a thing. For example, a non-technical friend that I'd worked with a few times came to me last year with an idea. I wasn't looking to jump ship from my current gig, but I was happy to advise him as he ramped up. We took his idea and boiled it down to some minimal questions that needed to be answered. From there, he manually simulated the product: he manually gathered data from publicly available sources, manually dumped them into the tech he intended to use for some analysis, manually evaluated the results, etc. The result? In less than two weeks' time, we figured out that he actually had a decent idea going. Over beers, I sketched for him a general outline of how I'd automate the process -- nothing too detailed, nothing getting into the weeds, but I was able to give him an outline and say "here is where you've got some risk" or "this part's easy." He shopped that around to a few folks, some of whom I was able to recommend to him, and ended up finding a technical cofounder. That guy threw everything I'd suggested away and went with another stack, but that's not the important part. What matters is that my buddy a) had proof that the thing could work, and b) had clearly done some due diligence in figuring out the initial development needs. That made him more attractive to technical people and led to his landing that technical cofounder. So I'd advise you to: 1. Think hard about how much what you're doing needs any code at all. 2. Anything you can do manually, you should go ahead and do just to prove things out to yourself and, later, to potential cofounders. 3. Find a friend or a friendly face at a local meetup who'd be willing to advise -- don't ask for anything more. 4. Use the outputs of these processes to either a) decide not to go forward with it, because that's what you may learn, or b) pitch technical people. Good luck!