Just yesterday I wrote about what I call “Amusement Park Theory”. Now I want to elaborate on the DOWNS.
Today is one of the big big downs. I am sick, worried, aggravated. I am so snappy that people around me are afraid to talk to me. I have been coding and reading about application design now for 3 straight days straight. I know now about MVC (Model-View-Controller) but I still can’t understand it truly. More specifically, I don’t know how to structure my own application on the MVC framework. I don’t know which functions should belong to View, which to Controller. I have also been looking at custom events, dispatchers, class extends and class implementations. My head is literally AS3 class soup.
Well if it takes time and energy that’s alright. But what worries me is “Can I ever learn that stuff in a decent, acceptable timeframe? What if there are other things that I really don’t have the resources to learn?” I don’t have eternity for this project, I have to move fast. I have been through so many web ideas and I have created none. I really, really want this one to pop-up online. The idea is amazing, its doable, its just awesome. But yet, I am not programming geek – I only got introduced to class-based programming this January. I work hard when I feel like it but I am new to this material. I get all those doubts now, “Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to write the code? Maybe It is more efficient to have it outsourced.”But then this is a whole different story on building up a startup:
– I have to worry about idea being stolen. If person X writes my application, at any point he can pick his shit up and finish off the idea on his own. And if he doesn’t steal it, he can blackmail for % of the company. Yeah, I know, NDA’s but who knows how well they work. Even if he is not interested in stealing and just wants to leave, I am left with his crap that is probably undocumented and has to be basically rewritten. And this can repeat again and again…
– I have to find money to pay this person X. And I can’t just get someone to do the job, it has to be done well. Plus, how do I find a good person? AS3 is new itself. Some people have been doing Flex for 6 months, but Flash is not Flex. Well yeah, I have a list of angel investors that I could approach, but asking for money before you have anything done is never a good strategy. Otherwise I would be wasting the few chances I have. This all doesn’t feel right.
This whole situation sucks big time. If I don’t figure out how to build that soon, this would be another project on the pile of scraps. And my partner this time is not a programming guru like Alek. This time Alek is away, busy with some other projects of his. I pitched my current idea to a more distant/recent friend of mine that got very excited and was eager to do work. I liked him, seemed like an honest guy, and besides sometimes all you need of someone is energy and dedication to figure the problems. But Noah is more of a firm thinker who gets me back to ground when my dreams make me fly. He is double majored in English and Philosophy which quite honestly helps zero at programming stage. I know we’ll have both a lot of work later, but for now I am on my own and this shit is not moving!!!
its 1,29am. Bed time.
Great point: “Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to write the code? Maybe It is more efficient to have it outsourced.â€
This book, The E-Myth Revisited (for like 20years in the BusinessWeek best-seller list) talks a lot about that. Ideally you would outsource, and yes, if you were running a bakery, you’d do more right to hire someone else do the baking for you. But the world of Intellectual Property is more complex, and apart from getting a trusted IP lawyer to go over those NDA’s for you, you’re pretty much left with one option:
Break down the project code in steps/parts/modules/divisions/i-don’t-know-what, and hire 2 people instead (or more). If they want to communicate, they communicate with you. But if you’re trusting just one person, or a group of people who already know each other or are bound to be best friends, you’re in for trouble. So, divide and conquer, and even then–even though you might not need to write a single line of code–you’d still probably have to spend a full-time day just going after their ass so that they don’t plot you out. As long as you make it clear that you can get bigger and better lawyers (and bounty-hunters lol:)) than they can, you should be fine, but again, you never know, some coders really think they’re god and have attitude problems (though hopefully those won’t be the ones you’ve recruited).
Outsourcing is a very bad idea, IMHO. If you are building a web business, your business is your web site. You need to be in full control, at least in the beginning. A startup I worked in had that exact problem. Both founders were business school types and had no understanding of how their product worked. Every time they changed their IT staff, the whole site would have to be rewritten, coz the new people wouldn’t want to work with the old code. Even worse, they couldn’t efficiently control quality and speed of development, because they had no idea how it’s done.
PS Свил е Ñтанал върл корпорат 🙂