I have a great idea for an App (iPhone/iOS). I have a plan drafted, but I have no funding or programmer/developer. What is the process I should take in bringing my idea to life?

There are a multitude of ways to succeed in tech. The choice is simple, either you become a developer or you hire one. Or is it? Before you start, some questions:Are you’re interested about many things and have all sorts of ideas? Do you have a horizontal skill set (like me) or a vertical one? Specialists have more of a vertical skill set. I’m in the position of knowing a lot of admirable people that is developers, designers, artists, musicians etc. I spend time finding out what it is that drives these human beings. I love to work with people with a vertical skill set, because I respect and admire them. They are amazingly talented people excited about life, the universe, and everything. Endlessly curious what will happen next in their realm and in the here and now. A horizontal skill set. Good to great at a lot of skills, can connect the dots on a project. Horizontal talent makes a great product manager or CEO Being blessed with a horizontal skill set results in having lots of crazy ideas. Do you have proof the idea will work? That said, your deep knowledge around an idea is probably limited. Your idea in your head is likely super mega awesome and breathtaking. To be honest, everyone makes assumptions. You need a proof of concept confirming those assumptions. That can be research, your insights from the field, some data from existing researches. Proving your idea is doable is key when you start talking to the right people (investors, developers, designers, specialists, etc) Bring a proof of concept to the table, it makes you more welcome. Convincing a friendly specialists to work with you for free and pay him pizza and club mate (or noodles and Red Bull, depends on your location) rarely happens. Developers and designers love a proper challenge but they themselves are doing all the work. Remember they’re creating the technology, not you. Bring the data, the knowledge about the market and the aspiration. Do your homework! Prototyping galore Another effort to get a proof of concept and persuade people is to create a prototype! Or something that explains the mechanisms and model of your idea and let potential users have a go at it. A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Yeah I know you’re not a developer, but neither am I a coder. I know the basics (like I said, horizontal skills). When it comes to prototyping, I hack together existing technologies to create a prototype. Use Facebook, Twitter, typeform, wordpress, something from Product Hunt, some plug ins / extensions or just plain old paper to create something that explains what you want to do. For example, when you want to create a social-like-gimmick-sharing-specific-niche-gadget-app (to be overly not specific haha). Start a Facebook group first to try out the mechanics. Define soem early adopters based on your persona. Invite those potential users and explain what the experiment, the mechanics and the specific goal and go from there. You’re able to look at things from a meta level (horizontal skill set yeah yeah), meaning from a higher level where you can distill what was important during the test. After experimentation you know if, how and which people will use your product. This is immensely valuable for future plans and will costs you close to nothing. You hacking a prototype results in: You having a great story to tell where you get some respect and hopefully sympathy for your efforts to developers (and potentially investors). The project is off to a great start already because you killed your assumptions, learned from that and you probably have approximately 50–100 (aim for that) potential users with their contact details. Be imaginative, hack something together for an experiment and you will be rewarded for your efforts. 1. Hiring a developerSo now you have a proof of concept, a prototype, you have some money, good for you! Building an awesome team and creating something amazing is about building a sustainable relationship with your coders,pixelobsessors and other specialists. If you see it as a ‘one off thing’, then you should better outsource your job to India and stop reading, but do write about your experience and http://twitter.com/milann, I’m always up for a good laugh. Nice, you’re still here. You want to hire a techie to do your project, make sure you have a good understanding between you and the specialist. Managing expectations is crucial to a good product, have a beer with one another, talk about random stuff. What are you aiming for in life, how you live your life, whatever. Know what kind of people you’re working with. Good design and awesome products/businesses happen when humans beings have healthy discussions. Manage expectations, implicit and explicitImportant is you have the same beliefs, skills come later. Make sure you focus on what you can do best, or better said, what you really want to do. Because here is the room to learn. For example, don’t bring a finished (your way) mockup to a designer. Also, don’t bring someone else’s code to a developer. There’s no challenge left for these specialists meaning they will find it attractive to work with you. To manage expectations well, start a http://trello.com/ board. Here you can implicitly communicate what you things need to be done, and your partner can add cards (tasks) to it as well. You probably do not have an office yet where you both can crunch away every day. It’s better to not communicate over ‘personal media’ like iMessage or whatsapp, but over a work related channel. Start a http://slack.com/ to get a remote conversation going. If you still use Skype, https://medium.com/@slackhq/11-useful-tips-for-getting-the-most-of-slack-5dfb3d1af77… Set everything up for yourself and your business partners (or http://www.onlineandkicking.com/tech-tools-workshop/ to show your team ;) ). Make sure you communicate, explicitly (shared documents, slack, etc) and implicitly (trello, slack integrations, etc). Show the respect for your team you’re about to hire and/or work with and you’re good to go. Pro tip: Keep a diary. Either publicly or on evernote. The struggles you experience are a joy to read for others (for sympathy) and for you a good laugh in the future. 2. Become more like a specialistAnother option is start building yourself, you can always become a guru (pun intended) in a specific field that is design, hardware, software or whatever. Hello World of hacking If you’re a developer yourself and can code your way to a prototype which is convincing you have a better chance of finding your co-founder. For example you can build back end systems and want to work with a front ender. Frontenders love to work with a backenders, Again, this is a long term thing. You don’t become a hacker code ninja overnight. Be aware you need to spend 1–3 years to be at least taken seriously. Me personally want to keep up with all the developments, so I try tools out and sometimes specialize a little and sometimes I take on a challenge: Become a hacker means having tools to learn. here are some platforms: http://www.codeavengers.com/ https://teamtreehouse.com/ http://www.codecademy.com/learn and: http://blog.ted.com/10-places-where-anyone-can-learn-to-code/ It’s easier to learn coding when you’re a gamer, you know that 80% of the time it’s frustration and the rest is reward and fun. Design, design, designI can’t press enough how important design is. Designer founders have been doing some interesting companies the last 10 years. Stuff like YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Etsy, Kickstarter, AirBnB, Typekit, and Path to name a few. The world needs more designer founders, they make products that work and look good. Do you want to become a designer? When you want there’s only one thing to read to get you started and that is this love letter to the profession: https://ia.net/know-how/learning-to-see Start sketching around and if you want to make it real in to pixels start using http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch/. This is pretty neat tool made in the Netherlands and it’s great for UI design. There are some platforms to learn the basics: http://trydesignlab.com/ https://hackdesign.org/ Good design is honest — It does not make a product appear more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept. Good luck with that… The ‘hacks for husslers’As you took the chance to read all the way till the end, I have some more tips for you. There’s also a middle road to be found in all this.. Three years ago, I was contacted by a pretty young fellow called https://twitter.com/samuelbeek and he was interested in learning more about the app world. I was active in that world he wanted to specialize. At the time he was still in high school at 17 years of age. I gave him a Wildcard, basically a chance to enter my network, to learn from me. While I throwed knowledge and people at him, he worked really hard to learn and thrive. He was a hidden gem, three years later he is one of the most aspiring and inspiring coders and dudes I know. Currently I have the privilege to http://getwildcard.co/. These moments are scarce but so magical. helping people out of the blue, give someone the means and tools without wanting something in return. Help people out of the blue, you never know what you will be getting out of it in the present plus futures etc. Basically, developers will only work for free if they have a strong connection to the project or to you as an initiator. And nowadays there’s such a big need for developers, codes and techies you can’t just throw money at a person and expect they’ll work for you. There happen to be platforms where you can find people and money for your project. Or communities where you can offer developers to work with you for a revenue share. For example http://assembly.com/ works like that, it’s like Quirky for apps. You share your bounties (tasks) and offer coins, what represents revenue share on the long run. I’m running one of my https://assembly.com/taggy using Assembly. Another way to meet developers and product people is on http://www.producthunt.com/, take a look every day, see what products excite you and go and have discussions with the makers. If you ask the right questions, have a little chat, be human. Maybe, just maybe they are excited about you or your idea and you can do something with them. Also, it helps to go to specific (tech) meetups to have beers with likeminded people, but rather with a different skillset. Scan and look for local events on http://meetup.com/ or http://evenbrite.com/. The Hackers & Founders meetup works really well here in Amsterdam. You probably have similar locally specific ones so check it out. Attend hackathons, check https://www.hackerleague.org/ for nearby and relevant hackathons and go and have a talk with the people sweating their way to a nice little hack they can present. Find out what excites these people and maybe you can find your co founder. It’s all about people, making the adventure worthwhile and enjoying the ride. YOLO! Are you still looking to find a developer? Share this story, http://twitter.com/milann and/or download http://wildcard.works/ to express your goal… Here are some must see/reads for your adventure https://www.gv.com/lib/does-your-startup-need-a-designer-cofounder https://growthhackers.com/ http://explosm.net/ http://andrewchen.co/ Check out http://www.founderdating.com/, lol http://vooza.com/welcome https://www.getscenery.com/, where you can have a custom backgrounds around your mockup Or you’re just here because you want to have your own startup If you’re just here to ‘have a startup’ to have the freedom to be your own boss, then good luck with that. Because it does not really work like that: https://medium.com/p/60a96555abc3 If all fails, work at a startup to feel the energy. http://qz.com/392049/want-to-work-at-a-startup-heres-how-to-pick-the-right-one/ Original post on Medium: https://medium.com/@milann/2-or-more-ways-to-make-your-tech-idea-happen-e2e5f0edcd7e

A few options are: 1.) Find a developer that believes in the idea and would be willing to do rev share or reduced rate + rev share 2.) Pay a great freelance developer to develop it for you 3.) Outsource it As a developer myself I get asked far too many times about #1. The majority of the time I either don't believe in the idea/individual to market the idea OR it's too big of a risk for me to put in months of my time with no guaranteed payback or a lower hourly rate. Being a freelance developer myself and knowing many great ones my biased opinion would say go with #2...but great developers can be expensive (probably not agency expensive though). If you go this route just make sure you check out the devs portfolio and make sure they're a good fit for you and the project. The outsource route does work for some people and they have great successes with it. I've seen the other side of that coin as well though and had to takeover and rewrite apps that were outsourced unsuccessfully. This could have been due to unrealistic expectations, mismanagement of the project, or not enough due diligence on the development company.

Have you taken a look at (http://www.appbackr.com) - It's basically the kickstarter for digital goods.  Full disclosure I work here.  We've helped hundreds of developers get funding for new projects.  Some have raised as much as $60,000 and some don't get much funding.  You want to share with your friends and family so they can become your first backrs.  Create a blog, tell the world about your project and why others will want to use it once it's available.  Do some due diligence and take a look at the competition to see what's out there.  You want to have a good plan of how you will get distribution and how you expect potential users to find your app in the sea of apps today.

Unless you've - either successfully built and sold a digital product before or - you've worked at Google, Uber or Apple in the past no one will give you money for just an idea. Ideas are great my friend, but execution is the key to success. Here is what you do - summarized in 5 sentences. Print this, and use it as a roadmap. You gotta go out, find yourself a technical co-founder who's as passionate about your app idea as you are. Then you research, research, research and validate your idea - is it really worth pursuing? Once you've done that, you build a prototype, test it, develop it further until you have a solid V1 that you can bring to the market. Gain traction, listen to your customers and keep perfecting your app. Then, only THEN, you go look for funding. Only then you've got something that someone will care for. Good luck!

You have 3 options to make this happen: 1) Learn programming and do it yourself 2) Get someone else excited about it & find someone else to do it with you. Notice, I didn't say FOR you. This is a collaboration. Warning: this almost 99% of the time does not work unless you have industry knowledge in the idea or have already made progress on it. 3) Get funding & find an independent developer or agency.

An idea for an app is not less worth than funds; there are companies to fund for the app ideas who are also offering venture capitalization, marketing solutions too but very few. Also here I would like to suggest the trustworthy one stop solution for you is to contact "http://www.softwaredevelopersindia.com/", you could develop your app from SDI mobile app developers, they are leading in this tech field for more than 11 years.

Bahahaha. Try searching on Quora for threads like this:

AppBackr might be appropriate, also Kickstarter. It really depends on the idea. And if all else fails, raise the money from the three F's - Friends, Family and Fools!

I would advise you to try http://www.sellanapp.com I funded my idea there, and it is currently in the development progress. Good luck!