Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

http://swombat.com/2011/6/5/golden-opportunity

by charlieirish • 14 years ago

122 113 14 years ago

swombat.com

kephra• 14 years ago

I always call it the programmers curse:

infinite ideas vs. limited time

sek• 14 years ago

Yeah I just realized that when Seth Godin mentioned it in a talk.

There is an unlimited amount of ideas out there, so these are not the scarcity at all. So they are pretty cheap.

Being able to execute them is the big thing. The ideas that sound really worth something, like patents are created by the Engineers themselves with an incredible amount of work.

Why should anybody care about your shower idea?

This also annoys me about the "idea guys", they are often incredibly simple. They didn't do any market research to validate anything, or thought about all the possible risks.

When somebody comes to me and says: "I had an idea and spent the last 2 months doing research about it. So I modified it and now have something where I am pretty confident there is demand for it."

This is something I would take serious.

cassetti• 14 years ago

It's also the guiding principle in economics. People will always have infinite wants and finite resources.

patman81• 14 years ago

Love it. I'll keep this post handy, so I can link to it in my next reply to an "idea guy".

If someone comes along with a great idea and suggests a revenue share, reminded him about the old truism that the idea is 1%, while execution is 99%. At least that will give you a starting point to negotiate the percentages of the revenue share...

OafTobark• 14 years ago

Should note that another major issue not mentioned in this post (of which I am sure there are more) is what the idea guy brings to the table beyond the idea. Majority over estimate their abilities, skills, knowledge, background, and even work ethics to such a shameful degree...

Apreche• 14 years ago

Not only do some overestimate their ethics, but developers typically very principled. I've had people tell me straight up their business model is to leech out a database of personal information from Facebook with crappy apps and such. Even if you offer money good luck finding someone who is both skilled and evil.

mmahemoff• 14 years ago

This is the crux of it. In other industries, the "idea guy" would usually be an investor bringing $$$ to the table. A random hustler can't just approach a civil engineer with "an idea" to partner on a new bridge and expect the engineer to quit working and give up the next few years. They have to offer major value.

I think the best thing a non-technical founder can do is follow lean principles and bring actual data to the table. Show they've actually done the research - MVPs, letters of intent, etc - and make it clear they have a vision they can execute on. All of that is in the realm of possibility for someone who's not a programmer, and would help to make the case they're serious and capable.

coopdog• 14 years ago

Definitely. Anyone coming to me with an idea I say that's great, just follow the lean principles to develop a non-technical MVP, and I'm in. Haven't had anyone come back with a proven MVP yet : P

marklit5• 14 years ago

Lots of contracts in London are paying £350 a day. £350 / day * 48 working weeks of the year * 5 days a week = £84,000 / year. £55,498.64 in your pocket after tax. Compare this to ~5 - 10 years of working for peanuts in a startup hoping for an exit. Keep your eye on the clients who agree to short payment terms, forget the dreamers.

StavrosK4• 14 years ago

In my experience, 350 was the low end. When recruiting, we couldn't get any decent people for under 400 (and I mean decent; 350 got us a Web front end developer who didn't know CSS). 400-450 did get us amazingly knowledgeable people, though, so that extra 50 was a small price to pay.

cs02rm0• 14 years ago

And if you want a reasonable back end developer then, well, even 450 is low end for a Java developer where I am a couple of hours outside London.

marklit5• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity were you recruiting developers directly or going via a headhunter or agency? £350 that I see a lot is what's offered from headhunter emails filling my inbox everyday. They take a large margin for themselves as a finders fee.

kami88456• 14 years ago

blah blah blah. Same contracting comparison that gets thrown into seemingly every thread. As an employee you get work guaranteed, as a freelancer you have to work for every hour of work twice (once to get it, once to actually do it). You also have to do your own taxes, basically run your own business, but with only the shitty parts of it (no potential for growth, bureaucracy, scheduling, negotiating your pay all the time, often stepping into completely unknown & WTF code, solitude, the list goes on and on).

Also who gives a fuck about money above 50k GBP? If you're young work a cool job, meet interesting people and learn lots of new stuff. Freelancing is almost never that. Working at a startup is, provided you pick the right one.

mgkimsal3• 14 years ago

"meet interesting people and learn lots of new stuff. Freelancing is almost never that."

Not my experience. Freelancing is what you make of it. To get some experience you may do some boring stuff early on, but if you've got no or little experience your 'startup' will likely fail.

90% of the freelancing work I've done over the last few years has generally been 'learning new stuff' and 'meeting interesting people' in somewhat challenging problem domains (trucking logistics, education, etc).

"Working at a startup is, provided you pick the right one."

Freelancing is what you make of it. Find interesting projects.

analog2• 14 years ago

Contracting isn't freelancing though. In my experience contract gigs are pretty easy to find, and you don't have to work that hard to get them. Send off a CV to a few agencies, wait, that's it.

If you're a consultant, spending time establishing thought leadership etc etc then yeah, but you'd be crazy to work for 350 per day in that case.

kristiandupont• 14 years ago

>as a freelancer you have to work for every hour of work twice

This has not been my experience. I've been doing this for years and I don't think I've ever spent more than two weeks looking for a gig. Even during the current crisis the market is great for developers (here in Denmark at least).

These projects have typically lasted three or four months. That makes me enough money to live off for the rest of the year which I have then spent travelling and working on my own projects.

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Hang on a second. Are you honestly saying that you think 350GBP/day is an unreasonably high goal for a contractor?

If my math is right, that works out to about $70/hr (USD), which is well on the low side for a 1 year contract, even assuming you're out in the sticks. That's closer to what you'd expect for a day rate as a salaried employee if you have any experience.

So no, you need to take on board that this is the sort of money you should be making. If you're not (and by assuming that only magical freelancers make that much, but only for a few weeks at a time, it sounds that way), you'd be well served to spend some effort getting your rate up where it belongs.

We'd actually all be better off were you to do so. As long as there are people willing to work for GBP65k/year, there will be companies taking advantage of them. But those same companies will happily pay market (as plenty of us can attest) if they have to.

ucee054• 14 years ago

Also who gives a fuck about money above 50k GBP?

Someone with 2 children in private school.

werner342• 14 years ago

I've been freelancing in London and always calculate my yearly expected income by multiplying it with 200 to account for holiday, sick leave and general overhead.

£350 * 200 = £70000 before taxes, I think £84000 is overly optimistic here.

marklit5• 14 years ago

But 200 days means you're working 40 weeks of the year leaving 12 weeks for everything else. I know some contractors aren't always working but I work next to ten other python developers who are only on six month contracts. Notice periods are anywhere from a day in some places to a month in others. Same as employment really.

Also, which startups here in the UK give you 12 weeks off a year?

flurdy• 14 years ago

48 weeks * 5 days a week is really best case scenario.

You have included 4 weeks of holiday, but not sickness, training courses, conferences, company admin, next contract sales and worst of all bench time between contracts.

My calculation are you are down to 45 weeks after 5 weeks holiday and UK bank holidays. Add 5 days for illness, 7 days for courses and conferences, 1 day a month for admin, 3 days every 6 months for sales, and suddenly you are down to 39 weeks. Add at best 2 weeks of bench time as lining up new contracts perfectly is tricky and you are down to 37 weeks.

£350 * 5 * 37 = 64,750 before tax.

Then it is the whole consideration of whether you are within IR35, which basically taxes you more than a normal employee, and is very difficult to not be within if freelancing on longer contracts in the UK.

Then accounting, insurance, hardware costs etc.

You would have to be on some real long term contracts without benchtime, no illness, no training and no expenses to get towards you numbers.

Working in Shoreditch myself I know most of the decent developers with 10 experience around here are earning a lot more than a contract guy would make on £350 per day.

aidos• 14 years ago

Contracting doesn't pay as much as freelancing. Lots of people contract fulltime at companies and ignore the IR35 issues (even though they shouldn't) for around £350/day.

Freelancing is different. You have to deal with all of the issues you mention above, cost of sales etc (though, get yourself an accountant, seriously) but the reward is higher. You're doing things at your own pace and if you're good you can really focus to make solid profit.

Contracting is just a regular hourly wage (and as you rightly point out, not always as good as it looks on the tin).

marklit5• 14 years ago

You can use an umbrella company to do all your accounting. Ten minutes at the end of each week doing time sheets, 30 minutes each month submitted receipts for write offs. Equipment costs can be deducted from taxes so they can end up being extremely cheap or free.

IR35 is a good point. If you have multiple contracts and don't work in any one place for more than two years you should avoid any questions around if it's really a contract or not. Most employed coders I know hardly stick around in a place for more than two years here in London.

martinced2• 14 years ago

"Keep your eye on the clients who agree to short payment terms, forget the dreamers."

OK but then also maybe forget HN and entrepreneurship?

marklit5• 14 years ago

I'm not sure why I'd have to give up on HN. Not every posting here relates to entrepreneurship. I've found countless posts which have turned my attentions to new technologies. Those technologies ended up helping me find new contracts.

I have met some talented developers who are keen to build a business of their dreams. I'm glad they're doing it as (1) they are trying to reach their goals in life and (2) they aren't competing with me for work :)

lampe• 14 years ago

the first point is the most matching. "Ideas are easy, execution is hard."

I often get requests of ideas but they are so hard to execute that you would need a bigger team to do it and a lot more money then the idea holder has...

snoonan• 14 years ago

Make options vest (or accelerate anyway) on product milestones, not time and I think it would help highlight where and when the value has been created.

realrocker• 14 years ago

I second it. This is much nicer response to keep away the "ideas guy".

venomsnake2• 14 years ago

I was approached with an idea it was by a guy that had years experience in the industry, connections to sell the thing and solid ideas how to market and fund the enterprise.

So far it is going fine. I think that this approach will see a lot of interested developers.

eps• 14 years ago

Did you know him before that?

venomsnake2• 14 years ago

We were introduced by a friend.

chrisbennet• 14 years ago

"You'd be crazy to have me work on this for a few months for 50% equity when you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity. Of course, if you don't think it is worth spending a few months of your own time why should I take a chance on it?"

jrogers655• 14 years ago

6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes.

It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it.

The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the soft sides of business is that they have a disproportionaly (as compared to tech specialists) large amount of experience in marketing, negotiation and soft skills. Hence, they market themselves and over inflate how important their contribution is. In my experience.

InclinedPlane• 14 years ago

Yeah, pretty sure I take offense at the idea that my skills are equivalent to 6 months of crash education by a novice.

RossM• 14 years ago

> Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes.

You're absolutely right that this isn't scalable, but if you're just looking to validate your idea why shouldn't an app made by someone with a few months of experience suffice? Once you've proven there's value in the idea with the prototype, I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get more experienced developers on board.

badatmath8• 14 years ago

Novice with 7 months of learning here. Quit my strategy consulting job to focus full time on learning to code, and am currently working on this project, built in Rails, on Heroku (it's all in Japanese, but the concept is similar to Hacker News/Reddit) http://www.daidake.com

Is this a bad idea? Would like to hear your thoughts. I have to admit I do feel like I'm in a little bit over my head, in that once/if I start getting a lot of users, I really have no idea how to scale this thing. I figure I need to start networking to find a brain that wants to team with me.

I'm glad I've learned to program though, even if at a beginner level. If this fails (I already have a previous project that was a resounding failure), I can test out new projects easily.

caseysoftware• 14 years ago

Acknowledging that most people won't be a very useful developer at that stage, I always propose a different approach..

I tell the person to sketch out the how a user moves through the app, what they can do where, and how it should work. I even tell them to sketch out something basic with powerpoint.

If they make it through those stages, it does two things: First, it demonstrates that they're relatively serious about the idea. More importantly, it lets them get a bunch of the oddities, inconsistencies, etc figured out before there's code involved. Making radical changes at that point is File->New.

martinced2• 14 years ago

"Teach yourself programming in ten years" by Peter Norvig for a hard cold reality check:

   http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Some may do impressive things in a bit less than that but I wouldn't trust anyone with less than a few years of programming (or at least education related to programming).

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

> you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity

Would you say that to a lawyer? To an engineer? To an athlete? To an artisan? So why do people say crap like that about programmers all the time?

Programming might be easy, but programming a product you can sell is hard alright. Let's stop pretending programming is sitting in front of an IDE and typing something that compiles/runs, in the same way we pretend anyone who operates a DSLR is a professional photographer.

georgespencer• 14 years ago

Eternal September has arrived for Hacker News. A post of this type or a loose twist on it (generally "engineering > ideas") appears every year.

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

Maybe I am doing something wrong but I have never been approached by such an idea guy - the last closest was running an insurance brokerage and just got fed up with poor delivery from his current devs yet had a laundry lost of features needed in his site

Maybe if you are getting approached by morons a lot you might want to review where you are hanging out - just there mus be some reason

joshcrews• 14 years ago

If you want such calls, but up a website with a title tag of "Ruby on Rails developer in <your local city> | <your phone number>". I'm not trying to parody anyone, that's what my website says and I get contacted frequently by idea guys.

sopooneo• 14 years ago

They're not necessarily stupid, they just don't have any understanding of goes into creating software.

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

Also to be fair I don't want to work on the idea of the guy paying 350-400 a day - but at least they pay.

I want to work on my idea - and that's hard enough

lifeisstillgood3• 14 years ago

Engineering is not the solution Ideas are not the solution

Feedback and willingness to be flexible are the solution

Who cares if the original idea sucks - is the prospective idea guy willing to invest time effort blood and tears making something happen - constantly measuring and validating ideas as they go

If yes leap in with both feet.

cammil• 14 years ago

The antidote to this is a well formulated requirements document.

If you can define precisely what you want, then you will have much more hope in recruiting developers.

Why? 1. The lack of ambiguity of the scope gives developers the opportunity to determine their costs with some accuracy. 2. The requirements define the benefits of the project. Either the developers are convinced your logic is correct, and therefore will make money, or they do not. The former lot are those that you can convince.

Wilya• 14 years ago

If you're trying to recruit Swombat when looking for a developer to build your idea, then yes, you probably won't be very successful. On the other hand, if you're bringing something to the table, and try to contact developers who are.. well.. mainly developers (as opposed to expensive consultants with decades of experience), your success rate might be higher.

And by "something", I don't mean code (nor the idea, but there are things beside those). Seriously, I'm a developer, I don't give a damn if my potential cofounders could code or not, that's redundant. I would look for someone who has what I can't easily get. Someone having an accurate view of the state of an industry, or being nosy and/or well-connected enough to be able to get this view. Or someone some marketing/sales skills. Or someone with some proof that people (preferably people with money) are interested in the product.

amikazmi• 14 years ago

I can value the skills of another developer. I can't value "well-connected" or "marketing/sales skills"

So if a developer comes to me with an idea, I can evaluate the partnership better- it is less risky then to go with a partner with complementary skills (not saying it's better to do it, it's just easier to figure out what you are getting into)

dhimes• 14 years ago

Ideas are easy, execution is hard

But good ideas are quite rare.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

The catch is that you don't know if the idea is good or not before validating it in real life.

TommyDANGerous• 14 years ago

Great to know, thanks. I've always had trouble dealing with Time zones and offsets, it's a headache dealing with time. Sign, I just don't got the time!

Hawkee• 14 years ago

I think it really comes down to the initial monetary investment of the idea guy. For the idea guy to approach a developer with a $200 software package and $8/mo web hosting they've got very little vested. Asking the developer to invest what amounts to anywhere from $60-$150/hr of development hours is unreasonable. Now if the idea guy has invested thousands into data, a nice piece of co-located hardware, exclusive partnerships with reputable advertisers, etc. we might have something. The idea is worth very little in terms of investment. I think the equity breakdown can be broken down as such: 5% for the idea and the dollar for dollar investment by each party.

Swizec7• 14 years ago

As a guy specialising on developing MVPs for people with ideas, here is the general list of rules I use before taking on a project:

1. Are you willing to pay my normal rate?

2. If so, can you convince me the market is there and you know how to address it.

3. Can you convince me _you_ are the guy who's going to be able to bring it all together?

I know that after rule 1 I shouldn't care, but with so many potential projects out there, I like working on ones I think will amount to something rather than spending two months coding and then having it all thrown away. Call it a personal satisfaction thing.

Fundamentally, the rules amount to equity isn't tasty.

kami88456• 14 years ago

You're ignoring a powerful aspect here: Founders are cash-poor, but equity-rich (almost infinitely so).

I don't know whether you have enough money to cover your costs (I assume so, you sound quite successful), but I think it would be interesting to seek out promising founders and take a little bit of equity, instead of another "bunch of money"(tm). That increase in money is not going to significantly change your life, getting an early in at a startup might though. And in addition to that, you'll probably enjoy building that umpteenth MVP a little more if you have the feeling that the quality of your work has a potential stake in your future.

There's of course a lot of my making assumptions here, but I think it's an interesting thought to consider.

swombat• 14 years ago

Only newbie founders are equity rich.

Smart, experienced founders would rather spend money than equity on anything other than a top quality cofounder.

Swizec7• 14 years ago

This is where my other rule comes in: "I am either a freelancer or a cofounder".

To be your cofounder you must also convince me that this project is something I want to spend the next several years of my life on and it must be great enough to convince me to drop other projects and start working on this full time. I don't believe in part-time cofounders, that way lies burnout and failed projects.

And despite all that, equity still isn't tasty so I will need to earn at least some of my normal rate anyway.

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

"but equity-rich (almost infinitely so)"

This is the part about equity that is most likely to bite you in the ass if you receive equity but ultimately do not control the allocation of it. (Common for early employee or founders on the technical side of things).

Day 1: Awesome, I own 10% of this company. If it sells for millions I will make a significant amount of money!

Day 630: Due to the "almost infinite" nature of equity and dilution, I now own 0.05% of the company. If it sells for millions I will be able to buy a cup of coffee!

lprubin• 14 years ago

The other reason to choose projects that appear to have a decent chance of success is that the longer the project goes, the more work you'll have without having to go through the hassle of finding a new client, vetting their idea, doing the contract back and forth, doing the negotiating, and establishing a good working relationship.

There is also the excellent resume and street cred of working on a successful startup, possibly with name recognition, vs a 'failed' one.

Swizec7• 14 years ago

Yes, that too. Funding out of pocket only goes so far, eventually there needs to be some sort of traction by either making sales or being able to attract investment. Without that, I might be out of a client sooner rather than later.

bbwharris• 14 years ago

Having done this type of consulting myself, I could never work around the maintenance issue.

You likely setup the entire system so if something goes wrong, whether its you're fault or not, you're on the line. It's all about reputation. And if you tarnish that by leaving a paid client behind when their server catches on fire, it will be remembered negatively.

It's hard to do this type of contract work continuously. You build up a portfolio of apps that you have to maintain. Most of the time you're clients are out of cash.

Equity is great but it doesn't put food on the table today. On the other hand it puts you in contact with some really great ideas and you get to play startup founder several times and you gain enormous perspective on what works and what doesn't.

RyanZAG• 14 years ago

Make it clear up front that you will charge for maintenance work, and if they can't afford it then it's a sad world, but you'll have to move on. You can try be nice and include free bugfixes for issues that are your fault -- this is nearly always a bad idea. You'll end up some some client that will be incredibly insistent that new features are actually bugfixes and all kinds of problems.

Always charge. People will respect you more, and any work you do for them for free will be abused. This is simple human nature - when you give away work for free, all you are creating immense confusion in the recipient. "Why did I get this for free? What's wrong with it? Is this guy so desperate?" This line of reasoning will quickly blossom in your clients mind, and before long your client will expect you to get up at 3am in the morning to add in some new feature he just dreamed up. When you refuse, his expectations of you are shattered and you will be remembered negatively - even when you just gave him free work!

Always charge. The less you need the work, the more your charge. The less you want to do the work, the more you charge. The more difficult the work is, the more you charge. No freebies, unless you make the reason extremely clear up front to prevent any confusion.

Swizec7• 14 years ago

In my opinion the correct response to maintenance requests is "Here is my daily rate".

The other correct response is "We can agree on a monthly retainer of X days for maintenance."

I try to avoid fixed cost projects, especially in early stages when specs are likely to be very fluid.

dvo• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, why do you specialize in developing MVPs for people with ideas, and how did you get into that type of work as a primary focus? Do you find that the work is more interesting than doing consulting jobs for more established businesses? Assuming you've found plenty of projects that meet your rules, do you have opportunities to become a co-founder, and have you considered them seriously?

I've done consulting, startups, and free work on side projects. At this point, if I find people and projects that meet my requirements, I'd probably prefer to become a co-founder and make a real go of it. I don't think I've ever taken a small amount of equity as compensation for substantial unpaid development work. Under those circumstances, equity is not tasty. I'd rather do well-paid consulting work or find a great team and go all in.

Swizec7• 14 years ago

I actually also fix MVPs when they start breaking :)

Honestly, I just find working with startups and small companies in general to be more interesting, even though there is usually slightly less money involved. I got into this type of work by hanging around Hacker News and writing blogposts aimed at a hackerpreneur auidence.

It's amazing how many great projects you can attract if your writing is half decent and you have a good idea once in a blue moon.

As for jumping full in, yeah I'd love to eventually, but I've learned to be cautious and cover my bases first. Maybe when I have money saved up so I don't have to earn anything for months on end. Being young has its disadvantages.

yoaviram• 14 years ago

It boils down to this: startups hardly fail because of technology (they do because of marketing). So no matter how good a developer is, he/she still has a very limited affect on success. Therefore taking equity, event a 50% stake is not a smart investment. Unfortunately startups can rarely afford to pay normal rates.

orangethirty• 14 years ago

Here is why I decline work offers:

- They cannot pay my rates.

- The client seems shady.

- The team/person will not agree to my terms.

- We have a chemistry clash.

- Red flags regarding the way they talk about people.

benjamincburns2• 14 years ago

I never thought I'd find myself repeating this.

A chicken tells a pig that they should start a restaurant together. The pig tells the chicken no. "Why?" asks the chicken. "Because you'd be involved, but I'd be committed."

Revenue share is a great idea, but there's no way I'm working on your idea for free while you just sit around and wait for me to make you money.

gesman• 14 years ago

The client who tries to give his own clueless estimate of complexity of the job - automatically gets into no-reply/spam list:

"...and i think it's not that complicated"

"...it shouldn't take more than ... to complete"

"...Joe Blow said it's simple and let's assume that"

radio4fan• 14 years ago

IME, that's pretty much all of them.

But then I think that nearly everyone has a tendency to think that anything they don't fully understand must be simple.

You don't have to hang around here or on Slashdot for long to see that programmers suffer from this too...

pknerd• 14 years ago

So true! Almost every week an entrepreneur contacts me and wants me to come his Next Big Idea and that on equity basis. I usually ask: If it's such an awesome idea then why doesn't he get funding and pay to developers. Usually they have no answer.

nimrody• 14 years ago

"The idea being proposed is often very unrealistic"

For some reason developers/engineers tend to be pessimistic while leaders/idea people tend to be optimistic.

In order to produce really great products you probably need both sides -- so don't dismiss the "idea guy" without giving the proposed idea at least some thought. Perhaps the original idea is too broad but can be the basis for a useful product.

jamesjguthrie• 14 years ago

"People approaching developers often dramatically underestimate the amount of development work, or the complexity of it."

I'd add underestimate the cost of a decent final product to that too.

sutro• 14 years ago

Some writers are OK with being ghostwriters, or copywriters. They can apply their craft within the confines of other people's ideas.

Great writers work on their own ideas.

StavrosK4• 14 years ago

Ugh, what does that even mean? What's a "great" writer, other than a writer who works on his own ideas, and why can't a "great" writer be a ghostwriter? This analogy doesn't even apply here, it's just a self-congratulatory remark to make some other readers feel better about "sticking it to the man".

FollowSteph3• 14 years ago

Another good criteria is have you done something before? Doesn't matter so much if it succeeded or not, but what you're looking for is will you follow through. Someone who has tried and put real effort, past the initial first few months, is likely to at least be worth further investigation. This little criteria removes over 99% of ideas only people

rwaliany• 14 years ago

I thought I’d weigh in my opinion as a developer-entrepreneur who has worked with various business and technical co-founders.

I wrote a post covering 'Business Product Responsibilities' with a graph here: http://simplyryan.com/2013/01/19/business-product-responsibi....

I have found that I don't want to work with non-technical founders because they often don't take ownership of their responsibilities.

Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

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