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> 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on worki

> 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability. But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point. If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.

sergioschuler 13y ago
Cash or no cash, I believe the key for a developer is working on an interesting problem + having impact. If you have real companies offering real money for a product that don't even exist, at least the developer can be convinced that his/her work will have impact.
- dagss 13y ago
  But I think a strong trend will be that less experienced and less skilled (and over-confident) developers will be more easily lured. How do you counter this trend when recruiting, and filter for the one that is skilled enough but still can be lured? You can't just take any developer to be solo developer for a startup (much harder than team development), especially to work on somebody else's idea.
jt2190 13y ago
I read that as selling the venture to the developer, i.e. convincing a developer that the company has all of the pieces it needs to be successful already except for a developer. Note that good freelancers usually have paying customers already, so even they will need some convincing to take on a new client. As far as offering equity to a developer, this may be as weak a move as building a product before proper validation, since it essentially means bringing on an investor before proving that there's something worth investing in.

sergioschuler 13y ago

Cash or no cash, I believe the key for a developer is working on an interesting problem + having impact. If you have real companies offering real money for a product that don't even exist, at least the developer can be convinced that his/her work will have impact.

dagss 13y ago
But I think a strong trend will be that less experienced and less skilled (and over-confident) developers will be more easily lured. How do you counter this trend when recruiting, and filter for the one that is skilled enough but still can be lured? You can't just take any developer to be solo developer for a startup (much harder than team development), especially to work on somebody else's idea.

jt2190 13y ago

I read that as selling the venture to the developer, i.e. convincing a developer that the company has all of the pieces it needs to be successful already except for a developer. Note that good freelancers usually have paying customers already, so even they will need some convincing to take on a new client. As far as offering equity to a developer, this may be as weak a move as building a product before proper validation, since it essentially means bringing on an investor before proving that there's something worth investing in.