I have a killer website idea that I've been mulling over, but I need a little help with the programming end. If I can get help I'll definitely put up some money to get this thing off the ground. I really think this baby's got wings, so if you have any interest send me a PM.
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e-lance.
hire a programmer in google.
If you're a college student and you've got a top 20 CS or Comp E program, just go over to the engineering department at your school and start offering kids who know PHP $10-12/hour to build you a website. You'll get higher quality code than scriptlance at roughly the same price.
The good news for small businesses and bad news for corporations is that writing code gets quadratically more expensive as things get more complicated and more users get involved. If you hire a college sophomore or junior on campus, what he comes up with might be able to handle double or triple the load that some code monkey from Xanadu can come up with before you have to rip everything out and start over on a larger scale with a developer who costs $30/hour and needs to write ten times as much code.
If you plan on this becoming a big business with a lot of traffic, this is an area where you should think about paying a little more for quality from the outset. Depending on how computation-intensive the business is, an extra $500 today can buy you a lot more revenue growth before you have to go hat in hand to a bunch of VCs to raise $100K so you can expand before the system crashes. So if you're thinking of a site where someone needs to retrieve relatively quickly changing information in order for you to earn a few cents worth of net revenues, bite the bullet and offer a few bucks extra an hour so you can be a little more selective about who you hire.
Second everything IP said above. You can go with Elance or oDesk and hire some code monkey from Timbuktu. It will be cheap, but you'll have to rip it up and redo it completely if you begin to gain any traction. Outsourced programmers are good for proofs of concept, not so great for ongoing development. It will only be marginally more expensive to get some American college students doing it for you (programming language is pretty much irrelevant, whatever they're comfortable with) and you'll be far happier in the long term.
^^^ Programming languages are generally irrelevent when it comes to product quality, but if you can find someone who already knows PHP, ASP, or Perl as well as MySQL databases, that can cut about 50 hours and a couple weeks off the project.
You can build a website in Java or even C++ if you really want, but it involves a lot of plug-ins and a lot of detours that you dont have to do in PHP, Perl, or ASP which are all designed for the web and typically signal "worked on websites before."
Try and find someone who's taken a CS Theory course and can talk about algorithmic complexity. A college student who understands algorithmic complexity is the difference between a system crashing at 1000 regular customers and a system making it until you've got 20,000 people online.
Yeah I remember when the paypal guys gave a speech on our campus and the whole speech was "blah blah SCALABILITY blah SCALABILITY"
Any idiot on scriptlance can come up with a solution for logging people in where users have to wait 1/100th of a second per user while the script goes through a file to authenticate them. That will work just fine until you get up to 500 users- at that point, folks will start complaining that it takes five seconds to load every page. And if you're making $1/month/user, that's hardly enough to take to a VC and get much credibility.
Somebody who uses a database or a live cache with a concurrent hashtable, though, can typically keep scaling in terms of a lot of things until you run out of memory, CPU cycles, or bandwidth on the same server. You can expect a junior year college kid in the top 20% of his class in programming ability (not necessarily grades) to be able to figure out how to efficiently manage 1, 2 or maybe 3 relatively powerful servers. After that, you will need to hire a professional senior developer ($100K/year) with several years of experience, who will probably turn around and ask you to start hiring database and concurrency experts by the time the customer base goes up by a factor of five. ($1 million/year) These numbers assume a Chicago-level cost of living/hiring.
You DON'T want to go hat in hand to the VCs before your business has a real chance to take off because some code monkey in Transylvania wrote some shitty code that had you reading stuff from disk all the time.
I saw an interview with Reid Hoffman of PayPal (Also founder of LinkedIn) who said during one month in the beginning of PayPal the company burned 12 MILLION in cash with no revenues. He said they couldn't lost money that fast if they went to the top of the building and started throwing stacks of $100 bills off the roof for a month.
As for your question, it depends on the size, scale, and type of business you are working on. I only know a little bit of PHP, MySQL, and HTML, but it was enough to build my venture's website on the Magento platform (Magento is an ecommerce web-platform). If you can find an appropriate platform to host your idea you might save time, money, resources, etc.
by the way most prototyping and first proof of concepts are done in rails or similar versions for java and python.
PHP is the front end scripting language, but the architecture is usually devised in the above. So you def got a trade-off between low cost prototpying it by a Timbuktu monkey or gettting something extendable and scalable by experienced engineers - usually you should rely on a IT department student, for they are coding closer to machines and for hard-wired software.
Uh....I would be prepared to pay money or, more likely, give x% of the profit to any programmers. So this blog post is moot. More generally, yeah I agree that it is a dick move to ask someone to work for free, but I'm not that guy, so there.
^^^Here's the thing though- programmers think that 70-90% of the contribution involved in a start-up is the code and the other 10-30% is the idea and the management. If you're going to pay a percentage of the business, expect the programmer(s) to demand a controlling interest- especially if they've taken a few business courses or run a business themselves. I studied both finance and CS, and I've run a small business. Programming is a bit more specialized than management from my experience. It's also more mentally draining- roughly the equivalent of solving an algebra or calculus problem every five or ten lines of code. Now imagine that a programmer spends hours on end doing this every day and the quality of his work while doing this probably has the greatest impact on the end user's experience and arguably the quality of the start-up's execution.
I would really recommend sticking to scrounging up a few grand and paying $10-15/hour along with maybe a very small percentage in options 5-10% as an incentive. There will be much less debate over how much a college student is worth per hour than who contributed what.
Agreed - I'm in the process of starting something up, and looking for a quality programmer, someone who either takes a reasonable salary plus maybe a small portion of equity. Personally, I would rather be comfortable knowing the programmer, etc. if you're dead serious about your business - as opposed to sending it off to timbuktu.
hire Mark Zuckerberg oh wait...
I have a side venture and my programmer is a sophmore at a T25 CS program, he's free but soon I might have to give him equity . If you click with the person, try to delay this for as much as you can ... then start the equity talks, and after some more time make it final. Don't be too greedy. Google started with volunteers and gave them a sub class of stock as pay.
If you had the time and resources to learn the programming language yourself, how long would it take? and what is the best way to go about doing it?
Im a programmer. I'm not looking for work :) but I can give you some advice about the site and general ideas of how/where to find good programmers. I build a few apps as side projects and at hackathon events. IMO the easiest part is development, gaining users is the hardest part, but ofcourse this is in general, depends on the nature of the site. PM me if interested.
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bump how did the project go?
I guess not many people do their research on startups before posting, or they just never have the experience working in the scene. No wonder you all need to get your MBA post-college =/
Why everyone put down the guy and no one suggested him to outsource the project to places cheaper like India?
Yes, it may not be reliable, but for beginners, it's all about building a functional prototype type first then improve from then on.
There have been successful examples that can turn into million dollar ideas, just ask Digg and Myyearbook.
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