Finding a programmer/partner...

So I am working on launching my new company, and I am currently seeking a talented programmer to get my site up and running. My main obstacle at the moment is resources, I have little. Not enough to pay a good programmer to build my site for me. I am currently pondering offering up a percentage of the profits, that way they have the potential to earn more down the road.

The problem is the devotion, most programmers out there are fro the money, and wont care less that your site fails after their duties are finished. This way they will invest their time in something they believe in. Because they wont see heaps of money right away, but as the business develops.

So im asking the programmers out there, would you (hypothetically) take a cut of the sites profits you built, or do you prefer your traditional hourly rate that you charge?

 

If I was given a dollar every time someone told me I'd be rich... I have seen many try and few succeed.

Personally I prefer to have the money up front. If the idea was a really really great one I'd take the money up front and a very small percentage of the profits until my fees were recouped.

For me to partner up and work for free, the idea had better be amazing.

 

There is a risk for a developer to take on this kind of work not because developers are all money grabbers but because you could create an exceptional site that you would normally have charged $10k+ but you never see a penny because your "partner" is terrible at running a business and the project fails due to them and not your work.

We do consider some work along these lines but do still require some up front payment (if you believe in the business and can convince us that it will fly there is no reason why you cannot get a small amount of funding from "somewhere").

Unlike a normal project we would want to see full business plans for the site, conformation of funds for any marketing plans etc and for very large projects would expect accountancy fees to be paid for the plans to be checked.

To date we receive several of these requests a week and have only accepted 2 as the vast majority have been unable to get funds to pay us in the traditional sense simply because they only have an idea and have cobbled together a plan on the back of a fag packet when we have asked for one. Some may have been successfuly but why do we take the risk of receiving $2,000 and may be money in the future (for which we have to spend more time and effort checking over etc) when we can get $10,000 in the same period and all future efforts on the site are also paid for?

 

Yep..what AstarothSolutions said.

The #1 rule for serious programmers/designers is not to get involved with people that will say that they will give you a percentage of the profits if you do it for free.

We get those offers all the time, but how do we know if YOU are serious if you don't have any resources to offer.
If you don't have the resources to pay a programmer, you most probably don't have the resources to properly market a website to make it a success.

You might get some college kids to fall for that, but they have less experience & skill.

 

We have time for our life and family. So we can not wait until ur site succeed. What happen if ur site failed? do we not have any money? Who will feed us?

 

I totally understand where you are all coming from, your decision is based on the fact that you trust the idea and are willing to risk your time to create the site.
But take into account Facebook, if the founder offered you 30% of the company but no money upfront, or $10,000 to make it, what would you do? If you took the payment, you would be $10K richer, if you took the stock , you would be a billionaire. Bigger risks have bigger rewards.
I feel that my idea has enough potential to shake the internet as much as Facebook has, but perhaps I would be better off finding a coder thats more focused on the idea, not the money.

 

One of the key factors here is the personality of the entrepreneur. As others have said, we get these offers all the time; at a dizzying rate in fact.

And we turn them down, because "hay guyz I have a l33t site idea" does not instill us with confidence. I've been on both sides of the entrepreneurial fence, with a couple of successes and dozens of failures.

Just the way girls can innately sniff out true confidence and animals can sense fear, programmers can detect...passion. Intensity.

The folks who get funding from y combinator and the like show a unique passion and intensity, along with (of course) a viable concept.

You might indeed have a good idea, maybe even a great one, but nothing in your post exudes excitement, passion, intensity, fire. Not a single word.

I think that might be the problem here. No offense, just an honest opinion.

 

None taken, however I don't think lack of passion is something im worried about. All my friends and family know how much i obcess and plan this idea, its almost constantly on my mind.
Keep in mind im not trying to exude any intensity in this post, im just trying to get some honest feedback.

 

Yes they do, but many sites that make it big are not done on a shoe string budget (You Tube was $10m if memory serves me correctly).

As others have said, risk does not ensure your mortgage gets paid or your family gets fed.

We do not flat turn down all of them, as said, we have done some in the past but only where we felt the risk was at an acceptable level as we had confidence in both the idea and the "management team" but even then we cannot do it for free. It is one thing to absorb the costs of our staff as we would have to pay them anyway but it is another to have to incure additional solicitor/ lawyer and accountants fees for going over the paper work to set up the agreement etc as these aren't fees we would otherwise be paying.

Could we have made more money than we received? In some of the projects we have done on a fee basis then certainly. Those we turned down? The majority still do not exist years on (or at least they havent used the domain they had bought) and many which do are the "next ebay" which occasionally have a single listing etc

 

With hindsight you would take the 30% of the company, but for every facebook or YouTube there are hundreds of sites that don't make it and thousands of ideas that never make it past the idea stage.

You may find either inexperienced or hobby developers who may be interested in working for nothing in their spare time, if you were doing an open source project you may find a the same, if your looking though for a professional developer to dedicate a significant amount of time and resource to something that may or may not pay them anything its quite a thing to ask.

Do you have any backing at all? VC funding, functional designs or is it just an idea? The more you have thought about it and the more you can give someone the more likely you are to find someone good who is willing to work for free until the money comes in.

These are the kind of things I would look for before even thinking twice at a project like this:-

• What is actually written down? Could I take what they have and start developing or would I/someone have to do a lot of analysis work. If I had to do the analysis work that means someone hasn't thought enough about their project.
• Has anyone put any money into the project, even if its with conditions
• Some kind of business plan, some indication that this project has a business aspect

Jen

 

Also consider scalability.

A hobby or newb developer won't know how to create a site that will work effectively in case hundreds of thousands or millions of users visit it each day. Even if you throw a lot of load balanced servers at it..it most probably will be slow.

A big problem with a lot of growing sites is scalablity..they can't handle the traffic cause the site wasn't programmed for it.

One database query on one page written inefficiently can slow down a whole site when the data grows.
I've seen a lot of these cases in my career.

Most of the cases required a reprogram of the entire site & it's database which can take time...and a site that's growing in popularity can't afford to be down for a month or two while it's getting reworked.

Not only does the site have to be scalable, but so does the code..if not, it'll cost you development time & money in the future when you want to add more functionality to the site.

The best thing to do to protect your idea is to hire someone who has experience in building large scale apps to build it right the 1st time. I'm sure Facebook did.

 

Your right it is a concern and is best built in at the beginning, and certainly no-one short of a professional developer used to developing large scale sites will be able to do that.

However it is possible to retro-fit it later, but it does cost a lot of time by that point time would certainly be money. I've had to do performance enhancing on several of my projects that have been done by inexperienced developers and its certainly not easy but almost always possible.

Jen

 

If you need support from me kindly tell me

 

Awesome advice guys, right now its just an idea, i have made all the site structures and algorithims are written. I plan on using Ruby on Rails, but i am aware of the modifications the RoR platform will need to meet the increasing server requests.

 

In theory it is best to have it done from the beginning but there is the practicallity of the fact that a site written to be able to work across multiple server farms with all the complexities that it entails is going to be massively more expensive than one that is designed to work on a single server/ balanced servers.

Many will go for a simpler solution first unless they have the budget to pay for the scale of marketing campaign required to get "over night" success and attract millions of visitors per day (though of cause you can be exceptionally lucky and just hit it big fast). Not so much as a proof of concept as many will not realise the limitations of what they have paid for but at the same time I doubt any serious business person paying $500 for a website will expect it to be able to take the volumes that Google does without having to spend more.

 

I dunno, there are loads of people who think paying peanuts for a website will get you something as big and scalable as any big website.

Mainly because most people don't know the effort involved in seriously high traffic websites most people just assume whatever the website whatever the database backend and its quality it will just take whatever is thrown at it.

Most people just starting out cant afford the costs of scaling until they are actually needing to scale to those kind of heights, so sometimes cheap and incapable of scaling is all you can afford.

Considering most "ideas" are a risk the lower cost to market the better, and hope if it takes off you can fix the scalablity before the market share is lost.

Jen

 

Not a seasoned programmer but I think the main thing that lacks with a partnership of this idea is one is in it for the money the other has an idea and that is what they are in it for. Take Gates and Allan the two guys who start Microsoft. Bill had the idea mainly and Allan had the marketing. Both contributed very much to the formation of the World's biggest software manufacturer but who do you hear about more?

For a partnership to work all ideas have to laid out on the table and the passion for the project has to be expressed by both parties. If that's not the case then it would be better to have an investor as he will only be concerned about profits and hardly about the actual project.

 

I agree a lot with what worldman said. To really be a partnership, all parties should be seeing eye to eye on the vision. I think that's the only way I'd ever get involved with a partnership, most likely someone I knew personally, and an idea I really thought could succeed. I think another thing you need to take into account is the relative cost if you were getting paid on the spot.

You guys keep throwing out this $10,000 figure, but a lot of times it might be a pretty small job that just needs someone to help with programming. In that case a smaller return might not be all that bad in light of what you would have charged for the project.

So overall, a programmer needs to trust the idea and the person behind the idea, really examine how much the project would cost if they charged upfront, and compare it to how much they think the project can realistically make. Never mind all the smaller factors, such as "Do I need food on the table right now? Or can I afford to not make money immediately?" It's not a simple answer.

 

Rep from me for everyone (except you sea_otter, can't give you any more right now). Great thread with some awesome perspective!

For me, everything depends on the scale of the project and how open the entrepreneur is to my opinion. I'm much more willing to spend a few days working out the code for something that I will receive residual income off of than a project that takes me weeks.

I, however, am in a unique situation because I have an income stream and a spouse that works. She doesn't want to work forever and is all for me building for the future. The more residual income I make, the better her chances of working at home with me.

The problem with the thread starter's proposition is that when someone has "the big dream" it usually A> isn't well planned out because the entrepreneur isn't a programmer and doesn't understand anything about what I do & B> the idea sound simple enough to them but underneath it all, the programming is very complex.

I respectfully disagree with the concept of having to build all sites to scale to 1M monthly users. If you build a fast site that is not terribly resource consuming, it will scale well enough to handle a couple 1,000 visitors a day. At this point you are (hopefully) making money and many VCs are begging to invest more ... a portion of which needs to go into code optimization and infrastructure. By doing this you can get a project off the ground and if/when it becomes successful you can regroup. Don't wait too late though as once unacceptable downtime is experienced, you have lost any integrity the site had ... and many users.

In the end, if I get a paycheck the money is gone after I have spent it. If I can make 15% of that same paycheck every month for the rest of my life ... you've got my attention.

 

The problem i see is B, the idea is very complicated to make, thats a certain. while i cant write code myself, i have several books on the programming languages i want to use for my site, so i know what needs to be done. If I took it upon myself to learn everything I need to write (including practice) it would take me years to make this. Perhaps I should have started sooner