Hire Experts

If you have some solid ideas for products and/or services to found a business on, your best bet in addition to coding up some early prototypes is to hire an expert. Even if you can't program at all, if you negotiate a consulting cost for the work up front and funnel your other income into the hands of a pro it will save you time. You may as well get used to the idea early of paying professionals to help take your abstract ideas and make them a reality.

I've tried attracting web programmers for months to a pet project of mine. While I was able to quickly get a very rudimentary version working, it's costing me precious time to get past the baby steps, time I can ill afford. While I enjoy learning about web technologies (mysql, Google App Engine/data store, and Scala) the process of getting those platforms/protocols/languages to quickly produce functionality I desire is cumbersome. Just learning the basics of oauth took me a couple of weeks, and I still haven't integrated that with my sample code.

The project I'm referring to is a semantic search and advertising layer. A simple version is live at Victusmedia.com which I'll embed in an iframe below. You can search or fire off ads based on user Twitter status. Vladimir Vukicevic has supported the concept since it's inception and while he's not a developer, I have little doubt his expertise will prove invaluable going forward (certainly once we narrow it down to the right problem/formally create a business).

[iframe http://www.victusmedia.com 480 600]

I've got a short list of developers I want to hire, so the last couple of months weren't a total loss. I need to estimate how much it will cost for an incremental build that I can leverage to pursue outside funding.

Good hunting fellow developers, business founders, and blogging enthusiasts. The world won't stand still so don't wait too long to strike the inspirational match.