News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-f... by evac on Friday December 17, 2010 @10:33PM (#2018809)
Thanks, it's definitely helpful as a comparison to my own activities the past month. Though in my case, I talked to an acquaintance about what I wanted to do and got his advices on what would be needed to build my idea, such as the languages, database, hosting, etc., so that I had an overall idea of how everything should work. Afterward, did a lot of background research too.

As for coding, part of the reason I'm not hiring a developer is because I don't have the money, so I'm making it up with having a lot of time and effort to spend.

Re:Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-f... by bcrawl on Friday December 17, 2010 @10:43PM (#2018828)
Can you tell us more about what kind of market this app is going to be? B2B/social etc? And what stage your product is in? Such as, have you designed/developed mockups/prototype etc? Since they take up a lot of time aswell if you are not familiar. And its not even coding. Just curious.
Re:Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-f... by evac on Friday December 17, 2010 @11:12PM (#2018868)
Sure, it's a consumer app intended to help people with productivity and goal-achieving by directly influencing their behaviors through a psychological/behavior economical approach. Too many apps focused on technological efficiency (ie. a better way to list your goals, how to track your time, etc) and not much on the psychological aspect (ie. maintaining long-term motivation, getting started on chores you hate, etc).

In terms of stage, I'm pre-mockup at the moment since the last 2.5 months were spent on researching and designing the psychological framework before I could get started on the technological parts. It took up a lot of time but necessary since there was no previous framework for guidance.

I don't have a visual mockup yet, which I plan to start working on next week, but I do have a very fleshed out textual description of what was needed for the prototype to work.