So it can be done.

In my personal experience, I've never seen outsourcing work well, or really work at all. The first startup I worked at spent $300k to setup an office in China, paying their developers about $10-15k/year. It would've been a great deal, except that the China office produced nothing and sucked up the complete time of both the CTO and chief scientist so they couldn't get anything done stateside. They would've been far better off writing the code themselves.

The startup I talked about above was some years ago, and I had no idea how to program anything. It worked out because we were extremely persistent, and simply didn't take no for an answer. A year ago I thought that it might be a good idea to actually learn to hack, and so I set about learning it. Now I'm doing a web-based startup and I have to admit that programming it yourself, and knowing what the heck you're talking about gives a number of advantages:

1) your dependance on external partners is minimised

2) you can see what features are trivial to do, which are hard, and which are just impossible.

3) your product becomes better because it is what you want, not someone elses interpretation of what you want.

4) you don't need a lot of capital, just a lot of time.

For your experience, persistence and not taking no are both really important to startups and very difficult for many technical people. So you added some value that a hacker couldn't get by just going off and doing the same thing on his own.

In the startup I mentioned above, the founders were all technical people and didn't really add anything of business value besides that. They were outsourcing because it was cheap and out of a misguided assumption that they needed a big team (and probably because they were spending Other People's Money). They would've been far better off writing the product themselves.

I don't know enough about drinko to know what s/he brings to the table, but unless it's a lot of sales connections to potential customers, it'll be hard for a good programmer to justify spending time on her project vs. all the other projects out there.

An overall note on your post: I think that when you break it all down there are basically only two things that matter in a startup: 1) having a product. 2) being able to sell it. Often the people that are good at making products are terrible at selling them and vice versa. So you certainly need good hackers, but you also need great salesmen. And both of them need to be pretty persistent, since they're facing tough jobs.

Well, it would be a lot easier if it were just a collection of rules to follow;-)

I'd be interested to hear what mixmax did, in what field, in order to succeed without technical people, although it's mainly academic interest, as I'm definitely "technical people" myself.

I don't think you can blame outsourcing for that exclusively. Most startups rewrite their code multiple times, to track design changes. OTOH, if it was a rewrite motivated by code quality issues, I can see what you mean.

;-)

(The beers make us care even more.)

Hope someday we get that chance.

where do you live?

I and a couple of friends of mine did the technical work for a startup on a contract basis 2-3 years ago. We were working in our spare time, and it seemed like a fun project, and a good occasion to learn Rails.

Of course, little did we realize that they were planning to pay us with money they hadn't actually raised yet.

We did end up completing the working demo for them, but basically left after that because they weren't paying us. They had the demo they needed to keep pitching it to investors, but it took a lot longer than they had expected. A year or so later, they had apparently raised more capital, because they launched a beta from a different technical team that had apparently rewritten the site from scratch in PHP. They have since unlaunched, though the site still offers to let you know when they launch.

If you can perform technical work yourself, you have the ability to keep working on delivering the product you want to deliver without draining your cash reserves. You can take a day job, live in your parents basement, or whatever works for you that allows you to keep building your company.

If you can't perform technical work yourself, then the minute you run out of money, you lose the ability to work on your product. That gives your project a much higher risk of failure.

We outsourced initial development of a prototype, it cost us little money but much time, and the quality of the output was appalling (from both a user and a technical perspective). It was functional on a very pedantic level, but mostly useless.

Daniel

What was it? Sounds fun.

Basically it’s an advertising display. The way it works is that you have a motor with an attached circuitboard that has a row of RGB LED’s attached in a line from the center and out. When you spin the circuitboard and modulate the LED’s in the right fashion you can create the illusion of a display that’s hanging in midair. This is pretty computationally intensive for an embedded application (72 RGB LED’s that each need to update roughly 5000 times a second) so we used FPGA’s for it. The whole contraption has a built-in GSM phone module, and can communicate with a central server. The idea is that you take the display to a bar or some other outlet and plug it in. It will then automatically call in to the central server and request updates. Each display has a unique ID and thus it is possible to create content and advertising for individual displays, or groups of displays. If for instance you want to advertise in a certain part of town you can buy advertising time on only displays in the part of town you’re interested in. There’s a webbased tool for doing this.

Our focus was on building a media channel, and we thought we would be distracted by doing consumer products as well.

The idea was that always that she would be a full co-founder. We agreed on a low equity split initially because of the asymmetric risk we were taking. The idea was always to increase her stake 6 months into the project, but not in the way it happened.

I met her through a friend, and 3 months ago would have been proud to call her my cofounder.

I am going to learn to hack regardless, I am just trying to figure out the best way forward in the short term, as the payoff for learning to hack will be a few months.

I think in retrospect it would have been better to offer 50% and the same salary as you.

Going forward though, I'd say definitely learn to hack. Also find people who might help not because of a salary, but because they think the idea is cool and want to be part of it.

Any scaling equity package should be linked to dates and performance goals. You basically said you didn't want her to own the company unless it succeeded, when success was contingent on her.

Sounds like she trusted you. Then stopped trusting you. Then left a few months later. You screwed up. Go apologize.

It wasn't a hazy equity offer.

Stop refuting everyone's opinion.

For example, if there was another partner here that knew how to hack, but wasn't a nurse, I'd say: Learn as much as possible about health care - it's your industry.

it does sound like she didn't have the experience or the maturity to whittle down to an achievable project, however. learn to code, maybe that plus this experience will make you a much stronger manager and designer next time around.

Point remains that asking for equity does not fit with expectation of failure.

It doesn't have to be that long. Do you have any programming experience? Do you have any friends that do? With a smart friend guiding you through, you can skip a lot of annoyances when you learn to program.

This is also a prudent point - what have you been doing the last 12 months? That would have been more than enough to get the hang of Django...

Market research, ethnographic study, trying to raise more funding,(too early for VCs here, and there are not many risk taking angels here), running the ongoing alpha, liaising with patient groups, and health organisations, writing copy and designing interfaces. Learning about tech startups is a phase transition from the perspective of a nurse.