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Is it too late for me to be a programmer?

What is the best stage to add a programmer? Is it better to hire a (subpar) programmer to build a product prior to funding? Or would it be better to raise funding to recruit a top notch programmer?

  • Answer:

    I had the exact same issue a few years ago. Here's what I learned. It is better to wait to have some money - not the whole shebang of funding that you need, but just enough to get to a Minimum Viable Product. If you don't know what that means, check out Eric Ries's blog. What I have found is that it is actually better to go to Angels with a sorta proto-type of what you plan to build. The steps to make that happen are as follows, 1) Use a wireframing tool like Balsamiq, JustinMind or Mockflow (almost all have free plans) to create some wireframes of what you want your pages to look like 2) Go to 99designs or similar site and pay someone to take your wires and make them somewhat pretty (probably cost you $300 - $500). What you should end up with are PSD files 3) Get one of those PSD to HTML5 services to convert your files to html so that you can make navigation interactive (probably cost between $300 - $1000 depending on how many files there are. Once you get this done, you essentially have the front-end of your product. This helps with two things - helping your Angels understand what your vision is about and secondly, it will make your development process a lot smoother. With this approach you should be able to go out and get funding from Angels to do development with a good programmer.

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Well, if you hire a subpar programmer to build the product prior to funding, you're just going to end up paying the top-notch programmer a ton of extra money to fix it after you get funded. So... wait. I have many clients who have made this mistake. One client paid a subpar programmer to build the backend of their website. I think they paid about $2,500. When they got funding, they ended up paying a top-notch guy about $20,000 to fix it and essentially rebuild it, all while trying to keep the customers they had amassed from being inconvenienced in the process. Had he waited, it would have cost him about $7,500 instead of the $22,500 he paid.

Paul Komarek

Paul, thank you for the insight.  My fear stems from having no entrepreneurial experience and no tangible product, which I believe will make it extremely difficult to raise seed money.  Seeing as the seed money would be utilized to hire a programmer to build the product, therein lies a catch 22.  We've built a compelling pitch and wrote a business plan; do you think the next step would be to get in front of angels or bootstrap and build out a product first?

Blake Joh

Hi Blake, What did you end up doing?  I am in the same boat at the moment and would like to hear from someone in a similar situation.  Thanks, Milos

Milos Jovanovic

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