Are you a solid-brass-balls entrepreneur not afraid of rasing money? Can you knock down every tabloid's door to get our story told? Can you set up appointments across the globe with people richer than god? Can you bring a thousand customers just the first month and two thousands more the next?

I can code the whole fucking app in one month and get version two ready the next month if that is what you need. See? That's execution, my friend. I can code apps blindfolded and with my hands tied. Can you do business like that? I don't want dreamers, I want doers.

Now, stop wasting my time with an idea, I have had plenty every day of my life since I started programming and I have spent twenty years perfectioning my skills. I know what I can do.

So, I ask you again, what are your business skills? Besides having an idea?

One burnt bridge that turns out to be a major success later on, even if they are a hack, actually, can kill you.

The parable of the Lion and the Mouse should always be heeded.

Either you produce value for the overall project, or you don't. Ideas are worth something, but sitting on one and doing nothing is not.

That's my problem with "I just need a programmer" entrepreneurs. I can work out how to get paid, but I can't work out how to make them understand software well enough to make good business decisions about a software company.

(The same thing is true of "I just need a salesperson," of course.)

Why do you ask?

That's my problem with "I'm the magic water" software developers. I can work out how to pay them, but I can't work out how to make them understand users well enough to make good business decisions about a consumer-focused company.

(Note: I'm actually a developer. And I see that you understand the counterpoint as well, as shown by your last line.)

If the salespeople say that the customers don't want what we sell, are the product managers to blame? Or are the salespeople not very good at their jobs and clinging to the false objections raised by prospective customers?

A sales manager must a decent understanding of sales to manage sales. A development manager must have a decent understanding of development to manage development.

An entrepreneur in a software-centric company had better have a decent understanding of several different things to succeed. It is not enough to say, "I know good software when I see it," IMO.

Six months ago I quit my banking job of five years to learn how to program. I am taking discrete math, data structures & algorithms, and computer organization courses as a non-degree student. I am also up to speed with python/django/HTML/CSS/JS, or at least I know them well enough to hack a prototype together.

Programming is overwhelming at first, but seriously, it's not that hard to learn enough to test out your ideas.

Jobs did some programming and soldering logic boards. Gates wrote a BASIC interpreter with Paul Allen. Zuckerberg was in Harvard C.S., I believe, and wrote the first implementation of Facebook himself. Bezos has a B.S. in C.S. and Electrical Engineering. Larry, Sergey, Jerry Yang all Stanford C.S. grad school drop outs.

So, I am having a hard time coming up with a spectacularly successful software company where the founders "just needed a programmer."

That said, if we're talking "founders," Steve Wozniak was built right in, and he's the computer guru we're looking for. Just giving the computational credit where it's due, on this one.

You know how that happened? They shared common interests, including knowledge of electronics, pulling pranks and passion for computers (yes, Jobs was technically competent enough).

And if I know one thing about %99.9999 of would-be entrepreneurs: they aren't best friends with someone like Wozniak.

To be an entrepreneur regardless of the domain, you either have to have enough money to buy top talent or you need to be able to do the job yourself.

E.g. you will utterly fail to start a business that produces tasty eco-sausages if you have no idea how to: a) produce or buy eco meat or other ingredients and b) make tasty sausages or c) hire a chef working for a 4 starts restaurant that loves to make sausages

If you don't believe me, try it out.

Entrepreneurs that think coming up with an idea is enough, and "just need a programmer" are lying to themselves. But hey, they are free to try it out.

I wouldn't quite claim that ideas aren't worth much. I know a few academics, and they are rightly careful about sharing their ideas before they get far enough with the implementation (lab work, publications) to ensure that they will be credited. If I'm going to agree that "idea stealing" is a problem, then I'm committed to agreeing that raw ideas do have some value.

Software can be like this, but in general, I think most software "ideas" are more similar to an idea for a novel, painting, or screenplay than a blockbuster pharmaceutical drug. Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products - maybe almost as different as two different novels. Hell, give two writers or programmers the same detailed outline, and you'll probably end up with two different outcomes.

When I was in college, "business types" walked through shopping malls and appended "dot com" to what they saw, and thought they had a valuable idea. Now, people tend to prepend "social networking for" or "wireless". "Social networking - for surfers! for moms!"

Now one warning - however much I may feel this way, the law isn't necessarily on my side. IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent. So to that extent, the law does recognize a separation between idea and implementation.

Perhaps it is just different fields, but most academics I know (I know math from my own graduate studies and history indirectly through my wife) will talk your ear off about their current work if you express a willingness to listen much less an interest. Most of the ones I know (again math and history) aren't worried about idea stealing because they have more ideas than they have time to work on and they know that all but the most trivial ideas will take substantial work to go forward with, its the research that counts not the idea for research.

IANAL and everything, but some IP lawyers came to talk to a startup I worked at once to tell us about how important it is to shut the fuck up, and evidently simply being "the programmer" doesn't mean you have to be included on a patent.

IANAL, but this definitely fits with my limited understanding of patent law. But that does not mean ideas per se have value outside the law. This is more an indication that patent law needs to be reformed than that ideas have intrinsic value.

(Incidentally, Richard Feynman has an interesting story about how his name wound up on the patent for nuclear submarines in his book: What Do You Care What Other People Think?)

I strongly disagree with that. Although ideas and execution (i.e. software) are both "nothing more" than information, they don't have much in common. Also, ideas are refined as well as changed during execution - that is, our perception of the big picture changes as we get more information about the details.

> Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

I fully agree with that. BTW, this somewhat contradicts the first statement.

>Give two programmers the same "idea", and you'll end up with two different products

Do you or the parent have a citation?

I used to work in patents, the number of independent recurrences of the same idea in a particular field is often pretty high. All truck drivers appear to think of digital number plates for example.

Exact details may differ but I'd expect the majority of programmers to come up with a lot of crossover if implementing a well-defined idea.

It depends on what you mean by idea of course - is it "we'll make a game" or is it "we'll introduce digital scoring to board games" or "we'll allow bartering in our MMORPG".

I think that is nearly true from the customer's perspective. They (most likely) don't have any information about the idea and only know what they interact with in the form of the execution.

Firstly, programming is hard. It's not the sort of thing you pick up in a few weeks. Hell, there are people who manage to make it through a CS degree and several years in industry without actually knowing what they're doing. What makes you think it's a valuable use of your time to do something mediocre that other people have spent much of their lives learning to do well?

Secondly, good programming doesn't make a good business. It's as important (I would even say more important) to have a solid revenue model. Who are your customers? Why are they buying? How can you get more? These are questions many programmers wouldn't want to touch with a barge pole. Don't waste that symbiosis.

To me, the real message is that ideas aren't worth shit. Implementation is king. It seems like a lot of people (angry ex-startup programmers?) confuse real business people (who can contribute a lot to a team in sales & biz dev) with useless "ideas guys". If you're one of those then, y'know, stop it. You should go learn an actual skill (programming or otherwise) that will allow you to contribute to the idea's realisation.

(I should clarify, though, that I think anyone working in software should learn about programming. But encouraging business guys to write their own code is like encouraging programmers to draw their own art.)

Understanding some of the challenges in writing software, being able to succesfully communicate with their software developers, understanding that "build me twitter for pets" is not a spec etc.

I had someone come to me the other day and they thought they had a brilliant idea, if only I could put it together (but it would probably be easy). He described Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to me. I told him it already existed. He was deflated.

Since he couldn't even understand what he was talking about, he wasn't really even able to do competitive analysis and didn't know these things existed.

Much like business guys can't tell good coders from bad without knowing about programming (100% agreement there), it's just as important for programmers to know about business (sales cycles, product dev, customer service, etc.)

This hits home for me, struggling to self-learn desktop programming, pushing back expected prototype dates further and further.

That said, there is also a spectrum of business difficulty. Running a laundromat is easier than running a startup, but I don't know enough about the business side to quantify that difference.

I view it as a sister to the Dunning Kroger effect. I don't know enough about business to grasp the difficulties in each problem, simply because I don't know what types of difficulties exist in business (at least, not as well as in programming).

The ones who end up being successful understand that they need to learn just as much about the process of software development and usability as we need to learn about their vertical. They understand that a good product is a result of give and take with your developers and analysts.

The ones who fail are the type A alpha dogs who just want you to do whatever they say because they are paying you a crap load of money per hour. They generally have the right mindset for an entrepreneur, they are trying to solve a problem they have. A couple of common problems are:

1) Everyone in their vertical may have this problem, but they assume everyone does business the same way that they do and follows the same process. They weigh down their system with too many requirements and business rules. As a result, they bury the one or two useful nuggets and end up with a product that is only suited to them.

2) They want to make some monolithic end to end solution right out the gate. They want to jump straight to being a WalMart sized franchise when they need to start as a mom and pop corner store (aka a MVP).

I tell them "Think of the skinniest chicken you can possibly make, that will still get up and walk, and make that first". They won't, or at least they don't. They cannot imagine their baby without All the bells and whistles.

All I can do is educate them on the process, help with archicture, and maybe (but not always) help out with the coding - I charge a lot and they generally shop the rest out.

After being burned a couple of times on this, the first thought that comes to mind when someone claims to be a subject-matter expert is that they're really an expert in the business processes used by one particular organization. It's very rare to meet someone who has sufficiently broad experience in an industry to know how and why processes differ between companies.

Paid a good chunk of my bills, I'll say that.

BizDev guy says he needs one of them "programmers" who can code and don't talk back to him. BizDev guy knew almost nothing about software development or the "properties of a system software". Business didn't work out because the software is flacky. BizDev guy blames them "programmers" when changes are hard, software is super buggy.

BizDev thinks he's awesome cause he has 3 things: Money, Network and Idea. Everybody should bow down to Money.

Programmers became hateful against the BizDev guy. They say "I can do this by myself, screw you guys". Then programmers try to re-create their ideal world: solving cool problems, working with cool gadgets, in a cool office environment. Some said programmers have to work in a close office, alone GASP. Of course these silos came up with a chunk of code that probably hard to be integrated. Them programmers try to hire BizDev guy cause now the VCs are on their butt asking how money could be made. Of course it'll be hard for them programmers to hire BizDev since they have a very strong bias. They probably ended up hiring Sales Engineer instead of bright BizDev.

Programmers think they're awesome cause they have 3 things: Knowledge, Skill and Idea. Knowledge is everything they say.

This... is why 9 out of 10 startups failed. That 1 startup that succeed? the BizDev guy has an MBA and BS in CS or EE. The Programmers? they took minor in economics/commerce or accounting.

Why didn't I learn to program? I had maybe an hour/day in between my job and my side hustle, and I just didn't have enough time to get through the problems in order to be a good programmer.

Since then, I've found that watching projects come to life, while learning on the side, has made it much easier to pick up Objective C, Javascript, Ruby, etc. Of course, I didn't expect programmers to work for free...that would be ridiculous.

That being said, it's kind of like learning HTML or CSS, unless you're doing it actively, full-time, for months or even years, it's going to take some time to feel like you know what you're doing.

Lastly, there are so many languages. There's Ruby, Python, PHP, C and its variants, etc. Do you learn web languages or something like Objective C?

Those are some of the things that went through my mind when I started.

Except for MUMPS. Fuck that shit.

Amen.

"Just Do It" -Nike

Have you gotten much response from businesses that want to use your service? How are you advertising?

So when you freely share your idea before launching the product you already consider the value of the idea alone basically zero, while you think the value resides all in your execution.

That's why I believe that if you have an idea you'd better be an exacutor or a sales person, otherwise there no or little value in your contribution. There's no shortage of ideas.

A computationally-literate idea that's well developed, on the other hand, can be very valuable, and can account for probably 90% of the interestingness of idea+implementation. Not always: sometimes you find really major things in the implementation that cause you to rethink the idea. But there are many times that I've implemented a theoretical idea myself and not really learned anything in doing so. You read a paper, or even a blog post, which explains an idea in detail, motivates why the author developed it, gives a broad sketch of how you'd implement it, etc., etc., but the author hasn't actually implemented it. Then I implement it myself. Have I provided the majority of the value, because I'm the first person with working code? Not really; in many cases the implementation was a pretty straightforward translation of the idea into code.

A computationally literate and well-developed idea is arguably something close to "execution", but not quite the nuts-and-bolts variety. To use a physics analogy, my ideas on space travel are not very well developed or valuable, but Freeman Dyson's are valuable, even though he's implemented his ideas to the same extent I have: neither one of us has ever attempted to build spaceships. He's a pure idea-person, but his ideas are developed quite fully, so readers can understand what he proposed and why, what its pros and cons might be, what possible pitfalls await, what the broad outlines of possible fixes for those pitfalls might be (even if they depend on materials or other things not currently available), etc.

I'd say the same of people even further into idea-land, like Isaac Asimov, who provided valuable ideas with nothing close to an implementation. The trick imo is that most ideas either just aren't novel enough to be interesting, or aren't sufficiently well developed and explained to provide value to a reader.

Since I started using Python I no longer bother with pseudo-code at all, but when I was using Java I considered a complete pseudo-code 90% of the implementation and translating into Java to only be the last 10%. You touch on this by saying that its "close to "execution"", but I think you do not go nearly far enough. It is most of the way to execution.

To put it another way, I think having an idea is like standing at a starting line for a race. You havne't done anything except contemplating running the actual race yet. Having a fully developped algorithm in pseudo-code (possibly along with a thorough UI concept) is like passing the last mile marker. You haven't finished the execution yet, but you have gone a very long way towards it...

Of course for simpler projects or in domains where the developer is extremely experienced and can anticipate every hiccup that might occur, that number could go much higher, but I don't think this is usually the case in the wild.

When I'm implementing someone else's paper, a heuristic I use is something like: did I "just" implement this paper, or did I learn important things while implementing it that aren't actually mentioned in the paper, and which I should probably write up somewhere for other people's benefit? Sometimes the answer is "just implemented" even if the implementation took a long time and was hairy.

Even if we put the number somewhere between 25-50% depending on the project, that is still a long way away from just having an idea. That still constitutes substantial progress and a solid start on execution.

Invariably, there is more to both programming and design than meets the eye. While learning can help obviate this problem it's not a cure-all; it is also important to learn how to a.) prioritize and simplify when your reach exceeds your grasp and b.) have realistic expectations for outcomes vs. budget.

It's a good idea to learn both, but again, the execution is more problematic.

My point is, even if you want something bad enough that you will sit there for a couple of weeks straight to cobble your vision together, nothing beats having it done by a professional that understands what they are doing.

I wish still we had a full time developer and ui designer available to us to make my much grander/awesome/profitable vision a reality. In time we will...

The key point is that you had something complete, it wasn't a vague idea.

In some sense, your prototype was "a product". It wasn't adequate in many ways.

I mention product because the "suits" are offering "I need someone to improve my product" terms while expecting "I need someone to build a product from my idea".

There's a huge gap between "a decent social site" and the minimal facebook, and market research and bizdev don't address that gap.

So that causes the situation where you have 30 or 50 people all trying to sell each other the same services, with nobody who can actually create anything new.

I would suspect some front-end GUI paired with a back-end database system would be needed, but what languages specifically would be best?

As an entrepreneur with a degree in Mech. Eng. and Entrp., and I have done programming in MATLAB, some VBA, and some HTML. So I understand the logic behind programs, but don't necessarily know all the languages.

Any and all suggestions are most welcomed!

Myself, I'm more of a Python (language) + PostgreSQL (database) person, but they may take a little longer to get up to speed with.

Wow. Color me shocked. /sarcasm

And the advice that they could just learn programming themselves? I don't think anyone ever says 'I need X, but don't know anything about it myself. I'll just learn it.' (At least, nobody that thinks logically.) It doesn't work that way. (Okay, granted, some small number of people might think that and actually succeed at it. But at the cost of things they could have been doing efficiently, instead.)

Yes, people do that. Like me, when I was interested in having a strawbale house I read a book and built a strawbale house (took 6 months). Learned a lot about construction in the process. When I wanted a website, I read a book and built my first website. Like the house, it was not the ultimate expression in its field but it was a website. So now I am not an expert at construction nor website building but I do know a whole lot more than the average person and I do know what parts are hard and what parts are easy. Makes the conversations with the real professionals much easier.

My dad is unusual too though. Say you need a new dryer, he'll go on and tell you that all it is is some heating something or other, sheet metal, yada yada yada. I'm half way to Sears... :-)

Or, maybe I'm just too used to the masses of those annoyingly slowly loading blogs.

Also it doesn't have dozens of plugins like so many blogs, so it's not hitting Facebook, addthis, last.fm, etc.

That might mean growing your network to find a co-founder or it might mean buckling down and learning to program yourself.

There's so much free information out there today that ignorance is no excuse.

Be good and make money at what you do so you can afford to pay good programmers what their time is worth, so they can make your idea happen without too much hassle.

(Disclaimer - I run a company that does just that)

The remarkable thing is that no matter how many times I get back to them with a time estimate of 6 months - or a cost investment of $50k - $100k to get it live etc. the first sentence they always speak is "it's just a simple site that ... "

In fact it's not really limited to these guys. Everyone who calls me to get something done starts off by telling me how simple it is. "It's just this simple thing that ... " as if that's somehow going to make me realise that it IS simple and I can actually do in a weekend what I had thought would take months!!

If it's that simple, DO IT YOURSELF!

After all, if it was so simple, it wouldn't take long to draw right? I insisted he include the appearance of validation messages, system generated emails and administration screens.

He didn't ask for my help again, but to his credit he did paper prototype another idea and got a guy to code it.

He also makes a good point about discouraging people ...it seems we need to do more of pointing people down the path of learning, implementation and discovery.

Yoh ho ho.

Ideas are important (although the usually mutate in the process of implementation.) The ability to implement is important (although the tendency to go after low hanging fruit rather than what is actually needed is strong.)

The last ingredient, though, is the ability to communicate the idea and the implementation to customers/investors/users/etc. Marketing, UI/Human Factors, and Sales are often as important.

Who knows how many times I've had a 'brilliant' idea for something outside my domain where I've said to myself "this is a great idea, now all I need is a ____". I am just thankful that I'm smart enough not to start asking successful people to buy into my stupid idea until I've done some research first...

Does anyone think this is overly optimistic or unrealistic?

If you have an idea and you learn how to implement it you might find yourself a single founder/creator.

You know what they say about those, right?

"What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best." -- Paul Graham, 18 mistakes, 2006.

Put another way - its like speaking a language in a foreign country - the effort and practice is quite meaningful to those who live there.

It seems that to avoid becoming a single founder we have to have the ability to reach out and speak the language of those we want to join us.

Cheerio yohs.