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Looks like you might need to farm out specific problems (e.g. I need a website, built on technology X, that has THESE capabilities). You could just put those sp

Looks like you might need to farm out specific problems (e.g. I need a website, built on technology X, that has THESE capabilities). You could just put those specific tasks out to tender on a programmers-for-hire site. Unless you are happy to part with some equity in your company. Here are some links on this topic to help. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-co-founder-myth-vijay-ganti https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-co-founder-myth-vijay-ga... https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founders https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-good-technical-co-founde... http://web.archive.org/web/20120229131356/http://lederhosenlabs.com/2011/05/31/technical-co-founders-are-overrated/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120229131356/http://lederhosenl...

arjunvpaul 9y ago
Thanks for the links. Yes, I would happily give away equity to a cofounder who can manage the tech side of things. I can scale this thing up a few 100K dollars a year the way I am doing this now. But it is excel sheets and 3 computers side by side so I can see product info, customer info etc side by side. Its just ugly. lol. I need some elegance in my life now. I have settled the "should I really bring-on a technical co-founder" question in my head and hence the post.
- doubleplusgood 9y ago
  My wife has a small business similar to yours, and I ended up building a micro CRM for her, complete with scraping (some of our vendors don't offer an Api), reports, invoicing etc.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    Curious: what impact did that have on her sales numbers?
    - doubleplusgood 9y ago
      It streamlined the process significantly, lowering the total "handling time" from a couple of hours to ~10-15m in total, which freed up time to tend to custom commissions from clients. I don't have serious hard numbers before that, as the CRM saw its first commit around sale #6.
  - arjunvpaul 9y ago
    My story is similar. My friends wife was selling Indian women clothes and I took a stab at re-jigging her business for the "messaging-first" world. worked like a charm. she is now selling a very non-differentiated product at the rate of 1 every 20 working minutes. :-) so now we have good problems to solve like actually needing a CRM, invoicing etc that I hoping to do via a web app. Once that is done, it could be sold to other similar businesses. I have already done some presales using my mockups and there is interest.
    - cylinder 9y ago
      you should just blog about whatsapp selling and sell your services; other than selling to Chinese on wechat I have no idea what this even is or how/why it works. below you said you are running whatsapp sales for b&m shops, but how do customers find you? afaik whatsapp has no discovery features.
      - arjunvpaul 9y ago
        If are really curious, I would be glad to explain on a call on how a customer finds us, how a sale happens and money is collected. don't wanna post exactly how that is done publicly (yet)
- majortennis 9y ago
  you could have multiple monitors instead of multiple monitors and machines
  - arjunvpaul 9y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I actually do have only multiple monitors. (not machines)

arjunvpaul 9y ago

Thanks for the links. Yes, I would happily give away equity to a cofounder who can manage the tech side of things. I can scale this thing up a few 100K dollars a year the way I am doing this now. But it is excel sheets and 3 computers side by side so I can see product info, customer info etc side by side. Its just ugly. lol. I need some elegance in my life now. I have settled the "should I really bring-on a technical co-founder" question in my head and hence the post.

doubleplusgood 9y ago
My wife has a small business similar to yours, and I ended up building a micro CRM for her, complete with scraping (some of our vendors don't offer an Api), reports, invoicing etc.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Curious: what impact did that have on her sales numbers?
  - doubleplusgood 9y ago
    It streamlined the process significantly, lowering the total "handling time" from a couple of hours to ~10-15m in total, which freed up time to tend to custom commissions from clients. I don't have serious hard numbers before that, as the CRM saw its first commit around sale #6.
- arjunvpaul 9y ago
  My story is similar. My friends wife was selling Indian women clothes and I took a stab at re-jigging her business for the "messaging-first" world. worked like a charm. she is now selling a very non-differentiated product at the rate of 1 every 20 working minutes. :-) so now we have good problems to solve like actually needing a CRM, invoicing etc that I hoping to do via a web app. Once that is done, it could be sold to other similar businesses. I have already done some presales using my mockups and there is interest.
  - cylinder 9y ago
    you should just blog about whatsapp selling and sell your services; other than selling to Chinese on wechat I have no idea what this even is or how/why it works. below you said you are running whatsapp sales for b&m shops, but how do customers find you? afaik whatsapp has no discovery features.
    - arjunvpaul 9y ago
      If are really curious, I would be glad to explain on a call on how a customer finds us, how a sale happens and money is collected. don't wanna post exactly how that is done publicly (yet)
majortennis 9y ago
you could have multiple monitors instead of multiple monitors and machines
- arjunvpaul 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. I actually do have only multiple monitors. (not machines)