What to do when coding an MVP is too expensive and no dev wants to be cofounder?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10054866

by Intoo • 11 years ago

3 11 11 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Jeremy1026• 11 years ago

Learn to do it yourself.

stray• 11 years ago

Redefine your MVP.

If it's too expensive it's not minimal enough. And if it can't be built (because it's too expensive) it's not viable at all.

luxpir• 11 years ago

Can you tell us what your product is? Even in the most general terms, it will help figure out how far away from MVP you are.

Intoo3• 11 years ago

the startup AL account: angel.co/intoo-1 ; joinintoo.com I had a cto/cofounder which "resigned" for health reasons concerning his parents/wife and can hardly find another one. The sketches on AL are more complicated than my MVP

crazypyro• 11 years ago

Besides what the other posters said, what do you have to offer as a cofounder who can't do technical work? What's your skill set?

mod• 11 years ago

Talk to more devs, or refine your idea based on feedback.

If you can't attract anyone, probably either your idea sucks, you personally don't add any value, or the scope of your idea is starting too large.

Ask them for feedback.

saltvedt• 11 years ago

Raise money from investors.

Code the MVP yourself.

jdmaresco• 11 years ago

Two questions to think about:

1) if you can't convince someone to work with you to build this how will you convince customers to buy it?

2) if you believe in the idea enough, what's keeping you from learning to code?

Intoo3• 11 years ago

1) Dennis Crowley supposedly searched for a cofounder for years before meeting Foursquares cofounder but I'm sure there are other examples.

2) I'm learning how to code, found it quite difficult from scratch, but the point is that without a team, my chances of finding an angel/VC to invest are really small even if I code it or pay someone to. Do you guys know any examples of successful startups where the founders were not friends?

aaronrau• 11 years ago

Please define "expensive". If it's a consumer app, hacking a wordpress template should only cost about ~$500.00 or hacking the sample projects from Parse.com can cost about ~$500.00-$1,000.

If it's a enterprise play, then you should be able to close $50k-$2mil for a paid project engagement from an enterprise client just by having a good powerpoint deck and an awesome sales pitch.

If neither options works, then you probably need to refine the idea more.

Intoo3• 11 years ago

By expensive, I mean several thousands dollars which I can't afford, however I thought of Wordpress and thanks for Parse but as the product is kind of like Pinterest for news and meeting like-minded people, wordpress won't allow me enough personalization.

You guys in SF bay can raise money without being in an incubator and without being live? Thanks a lot anyway

What to do when coding an MVP is too expensive and no dev wants to be cofounder?

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