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> This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Startups are a game of optimism. The mindset is: in it to win it

> This comment makes it seems like it's a foregone conclusion your business will be a success. Startups are a game of optimism. The mindset is: in it to win it. It's totally OK to be visualizing the finish line and your equity turning into a Tesla, house, or yacht. And you're all sharing the success. It's a huge motivator. > And, while I'm on that subject. DON'T leave your day job when you start your side project. Just keep your day job until you're making enough money with your side project before you leave! You can't survive in this field on a 4 hour work week. Let's be a bit more generous and assume we've built a savings with full time job first. What is the other founder bringing to the table while the programmer produces tangibles? Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. You have to go all-in. And a co-founder that's less than 100% is a serious red flag. Why would I want to share ownership with someone who saw this as a side project, when I view it as center of my life? Get what I mean?

jv22222 9y ago
Don't get me wrong I think having a co-founder is often a bad idea. I just don't like any of the reasons you mentioned. Hmm. Let's see. 1) It’s very hard to convince a cofounder to join an unproven business. And that is going to waste a lot of your time looking for someone. When you could be building your business instead. 2) You likely won’t need to build anything to validate your product if you use duct-taping, wizard of oz, lean startup. And after it's validated, well, just go ahead and build the mvp using the minimal toolset. 3) You can hire someone from a site like Upwork and in many cases they will be a lot cheaper than you are and still pretty good. 4) With frameworks like rails, laravel, bootstrap and a mountain of plugins it's pretty easy to build products that can make money in your spare time (10h week). > Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. If any of those things are grueling for you: a) Are you sure this is the right game for ya? ;) b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? c) Outsource them! Edit: If the main reason you want a co-founder is because you don't want to go it alone then you could fix that by joining a site like indi-hackers and talking to other founders as you work on your stuff. Maybe join a mastermind group. Etc.
- git-pull 9y ago
  I think this illustrates a mentality of undervaluing programmers. I think it underestimates how hard and intensive the job is. I think prospective co-founders do this exact thing to programmers. Why would someone go the extra mile, to work late into the night, for someone who just viewed them as commodities at the lowest bidder? Were any successful startups you can think of built on Upwork? (I think Digg's MVP was on oDesk.) Creating a sense of authenticity, [1] mindfulness of the product, aesthetic, value is hard to outsource. Unless you have someone sink their teeth in it. It's just not the trend I've seen at startups. > b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? As for the the library part. Just billing code alone is consuming my life right now. Sure, there's the stripe-python wrapper over the API, and djstripe. Which even goes all the way to create a database parity with Stripe's resources. Can djstripe handle multiple subscriptions for a customer? Will it automatically propagate plans configured locally so they exist on Stripe's end? Can djstripe recover from inconsistencies between the customer ID in local storage and stripe's remote (a custom intervention would be required). Does it have a flow for handling stripe elements (the widget that accepts billing info), creating a user (if logged out) and accepting the source? I can list more. Am I to expect an outsourced programmer is going to consider all these cases? Or do I have to wait for customers to drop off? There are superb libraries, permissively licensed ones. But no one-size-fits-all to give a workflow that looks top notch. A great deal of the skill when programming isn't just data-in/data-out, but gluing and synthesizing the parts cohesively. In this sense, there's a great differentiation from a programmer with less skill, or giving less effort, and someone taking the time to make it fit in. User's have an expectation of quality, typically based off the "craftsmanship" of other sites they visited. There are competitors, and having stuff like a good UX, somebody in your timezone, immediately accessible, "in the zone" on where your product is / its philosophy, that speaks english to debug things, all help. [1] It doesn't have to be a household name.
  - jv22222 9y ago
    I think we're violently agreeing and also we have somewhat similar side projects (i.e. helping other devs) ;)

jv22222 9y ago

Don't get me wrong I think having a co-founder is often a bad idea. I just don't like any of the reasons you mentioned. Hmm. Let's see. 1) It’s very hard to convince a cofounder to join an unproven business. And that is going to waste a lot of your time looking for someone. When you could be building your business instead. 2) You likely won’t need to build anything to validate your product if you use duct-taping, wizard of oz, lean startup. And after it's validated, well, just go ahead and build the mvp using the minimal toolset. 3) You can hire someone from a site like Upwork and in many cases they will be a lot cheaper than you are and still pretty good. 4) With frameworks like rails, laravel, bootstrap and a mountain of plugins it's pretty easy to build products that can make money in your spare time (10h week). > Billing code, dashboard, homepage, getting users, retaining users, design/ux, debugging, customer service/support. This takes months of grueling work. If any of those things are grueling for you: a) Are you sure this is the right game for ya? ;) b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? c) Outsource them! Edit: If the main reason you want a co-founder is because you don't want to go it alone then you could fix that by joining a site like indi-hackers and talking to other founders as you work on your stuff. Maybe join a mastermind group. Etc.

git-pull 9y ago
I think this illustrates a mentality of undervaluing programmers. I think it underestimates how hard and intensive the job is. I think prospective co-founders do this exact thing to programmers. Why would someone go the extra mile, to work late into the night, for someone who just viewed them as commodities at the lowest bidder? Were any successful startups you can think of built on Upwork? (I think Digg's MVP was on oDesk.) Creating a sense of authenticity, [1] mindfulness of the product, aesthetic, value is hard to outsource. Unless you have someone sink their teeth in it. It's just not the trend I've seen at startups. > b) Are you sure someone didn't already make a lib for that? As for the the library part. Just billing code alone is consuming my life right now. Sure, there's the stripe-python wrapper over the API, and djstripe. Which even goes all the way to create a database parity with Stripe's resources. Can djstripe handle multiple subscriptions for a customer? Will it automatically propagate plans configured locally so they exist on Stripe's end? Can djstripe recover from inconsistencies between the customer ID in local storage and stripe's remote (a custom intervention would be required). Does it have a flow for handling stripe elements (the widget that accepts billing info), creating a user (if logged out) and accepting the source? I can list more. Am I to expect an outsourced programmer is going to consider all these cases? Or do I have to wait for customers to drop off? There are superb libraries, permissively licensed ones. But no one-size-fits-all to give a workflow that looks top notch. A great deal of the skill when programming isn't just data-in/data-out, but gluing and synthesizing the parts cohesively. In this sense, there's a great differentiation from a programmer with less skill, or giving less effort, and someone taking the time to make it fit in. User's have an expectation of quality, typically based off the "craftsmanship" of other sites they visited. There are competitors, and having stuff like a good UX, somebody in your timezone, immediately accessible, "in the zone" on where your product is / its philosophy, that speaks english to debug things, all help. [1] It doesn't have to be a household name.
- jv22222 9y ago
  I think we're violently agreeing and also we have somewhat similar side projects (i.e. helping other devs) ;)