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Howdy! Well to answer the last question - yes a decent dev will be able to MAKE the frontend and backend. Designing the front end is a different story... The

Howdy! Well to answer the last question - yes a decent dev will be able to MAKE the frontend and backend. Designing the front end is a different story... The advice I give in these situations is to sell the product before you have anything. See if your boss would buy it - tell him you've found a great solution which does x, and y, and costs $Z per month. Don't underprice your offering - if it's good, and it solves a real problem, then people will be willing to pay a decent amount for it. I don't know what prices you were thinking of, but you could tell him it costs $50 a month. If that's too high for him, ask if you could get it down to $30 if he'd be willing to pay for it. Before you pay a developer, do a front end design - make it look nice (I'd steal someone elses design), and have it explain what your service does. Then set up adwords or advertise your site, and see if anyone clicks to buy the thing. If people are clicking to try what you've got then you might have a product -otherwise you've just saved yourself a shit load of money by not building the whole friggin thing. Lou http://TheStartupSlayer.com http://TheStartupSlayer.com

shane_armstrong 14y ago
I don't think that offering potential clients a service which doesn't exist yet is the best way to go forward, all this would do is damage the credibility of the company before you go ahead. You should create a minimum viable product, something simple and functional, something which gets the job done. Release it for free, develop a user base which is loyal, then as you grow and learn what is good for your service and what isn't, expand features, add a "pay to link your " + insertParameterHere + "services together." Such as, give a free account able to be used on up to say, 10 employees at a time where one person can set todo's for the employees, then to expand once people use the free version, add a CHEAP (I'm talking $2 per month cheap, 100 users at $2 will benefit you more at the start than 2 users at $50, because the more you are used, the more people will know about your service and the more hits you get on google, one upping your competition who charge 25x you) subscription option, for say 25 employees where anyone can assign todo's to others, as well as comment on existing todo's, change deadlines, give reviews on todo's already completed. Go from there. Yes, this will be expensive. But I would advise learning some simple programming yourself, this will help you to get slightly less ripped off by your chosen developer.

shane_armstrong 14y ago

I don't think that offering potential clients a service which doesn't exist yet is the best way to go forward, all this would do is damage the credibility of the company before you go ahead. You should create a minimum viable product, something simple and functional, something which gets the job done. Release it for free, develop a user base which is loyal, then as you grow and learn what is good for your service and what isn't, expand features, add a "pay to link your " + insertParameterHere + "services together." Such as, give a free account able to be used on up to say, 10 employees at a time where one person can set todo's for the employees, then to expand once people use the free version, add a CHEAP (I'm talking $2 per month cheap, 100 users at $2 will benefit you more at the start than 2 users at $50, because the more you are used, the more people will know about your service and the more hits you get on google, one upping your competition who charge 25x you) subscription option, for say 25 employees where anyone can assign todo's to others, as well as comment on existing todo's, change deadlines, give reviews on todo's already completed. Go from there. Yes, this will be expensive. But I would advise learning some simple programming yourself, this will help you to get slightly less ripped off by your chosen developer.