Incredible idea but no programming skills. What would you do?

UK-AL05 said:
Albeit there are successful one man band applications out there, trainyard is one, i've talked to the guy(meet him on reddit, hackernews etc). Trainyard overtook angry birds for awhile =P

I have a few apps, i don't need to work, i'm funding my masters now. I've never had any in the top apps though.
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Interesting, do you know what other one man band devs there are for iPhone apps? I know the dude who created Nanostudio is a one man band, pretty impressive when you consider how much attention to detail there is in that app...
 
MikeHunt79 said:
Interesting, do you know what other one man band devs there are for iPhone apps?
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Someone who can do good art, code and music really has my admiration.
 
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sunama said:
Surely though, using option3 would cost a lot more, than creating a dodgy prototype?
The whole point of creating the dodgy prototype is that generally it is done very quickly, is not polished and is done on the cheap.

If you had significant funding behind you, or are perhaps a medium-large company, you can certainly invest the time/money in creating version1, which is a fully polished product, but if we are talking about a 1 man band operation (as is the case with GordyR), then it might be wise to test the waters first, with the cheap/dodgy prototype. If the feedback is positive and you think your application has legs to run on, then invest a little more money and get the original prototype rewritten or developed further, into the fully polished version.
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"alpha"/"beta" also a fallacy, they are all versions. Version 1 is the first version, version 2 the second. Simplicity is the key :p

Iterarive/Agile development is the best of both worlds. You'll get what you need the most first, and you don't get any delays because things aren't polished.
 
Right.

But you don't seem to be addressing the financial cost, in all of this.
If someone is a one man band (as in GordyR's example) and that person does not want to commit much money to the project/idea, how can an entire team be hired to produce the software? The funds simply are not available.

In this case, the agile development team cannot be hired.
 
Whether he employs a single devloper or an entire team is of no consequence to if he employs somone using agile practices or not. He could approach a team and agree for only one person for he first week or so, and if it takes off then more developers can be brought on board.
 
GordyR said:
This I fear is exactly where the problem is going to be. And I am extremely thankful for your post. It is clear that I would have to be willing to give a huge amount away to get this done properly and to be as you say protected. Just grabbing a developer, saying devbuild me this then selling the app feels like a sure fire way to fail in the long term as Facebook certainly would just add the functionality to their own Facebook mobile app.

I need to think seriously before I do anthing... Any further advice would be very much appreciated.
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Sorry, only just came back to this. I'm afraid my advice really stops there as I appreciate you can't divulge any more info, which makes it quite hard to formulate a strategy. You've clearly got a good grasp of what I was saying and understand the inherent difficulty in protecting a good idea.

It does boil down to what you want from the app. A lot is given away these days, but I believe there are a number of tactics you could use to increase the chances of success. From a personal POV though I wouldn't leave a stable job for an idea, they have so many hurdles. I don't think you need to. If it reaches critical mass, then you can jump 100% behind it.
 
sunama said:
Many original ideas stem from one man band operations, which later, either become larger operations (read: companies) or get bought by a larger company.

What is being discussed here is that if you have a person (say GordyR), who has no programming skills, should he go all-out and hire a team to produce his software to a high standard, from the get-go OR should he get the job done by hiring a freelancer and get a quick/dirty prototype released, so that he can test the water, before creating the full blown, polished version produced.

I prefer the later idea, if only because the former idea has a significant amount of extra cost attached to it. What if the idea fails? At least by testing the water, you can check to see if the idea has a genuine merit, before committing large sums of money to it.

I assume that the train-yard creator is a programmer and did the programming himself?



Out of interest, what are you studying?
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You assume correctly.

I am studying MSc Advanced Computer Science(University of birmingham), testing the waters to see if i want to a phd.

"UK Train Times" is another quite popular application awhile back, the bbc interviewed the guy if i remember. Now runs a company called Agant ltd, I have noticed he also hiring on quite few of the job sites.

It would be a dream to actually start a company with staff as he is doing, as apposed to a one man contractor company, maybe after the masters...

I would most likely, as someone said before get in with a business partner perhaps a graphic designer and go 50/50 ownership as opposed to employing someone as i don't have enough capital to buffer out bad times. I could probably afford to rent an office, and a graphic designer for about 6 months before i run out of capital, so i really would have to hit the ground running to be stable.

Seems a little unfair on me though, saying already have contacts and previous clients.
 
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UK-AL05 said:
Seems a little unfair on me though, saying already have contacts and previous clients.
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In which case you shouldn't go 50-50. Offer him a lesser percentage. I guess it really depends on who is going to do what, in the company.

If you do 70% of the work and bring in 70% of the work (sales), then it only stands to reason that your partner would get less.
Remember sales are VERY important. If you do most of the actual development work, but your partner is the one who is generating and bringing in the sales, then he could well demand a higher percentage.

The problem I find is that although there are many people who are willing to be employed (ie. you pay them for a job, they do it and walk away), there are very few who are willing to invest their time and effort in a business proposal that may go sky high or may just disappear into nothingness. People just don't want to take the risk...and I should know ;)
 
I'm in the same boat as the OP. I wonder what happened to this project, I'd be keen for an update and lessons learnt if you're still around.

I had a great idea less than 3 months ago, I'm an anaesthetist and thought of an app that could revolutionise the NHS. Spent about a month developing the idea and it turned into a beast, lots of great off shoots from the original. I pitched the idea to a company with a track record of delivering award winning apps to the NHS and they love the idea, think it has a massive market and great potential. So we've met a few times now and on that front things are going well. I've made an interactive visual mock-up of the idea to show how it would work and now they are reviewing that in order to devote resources into developing the code and graphics. The plan is to release a minimum viable product in a couple of months in my department at my hospital. Once it's being used, we'll use app data and user feedback to develop the app in the direction users want. Then once we have something a bit more polished we'll expand the user base to other specialities and beyond. The potential market for this is anyone that uses the NHS!

The side which is not going so well and is ridiculously frustrating is intellectual property. In my anaesthetic contract it says that any IP I produce belongs to my employing NHS Trust. I discovered that my hospital has an innovation division run by the hospitals clinical director no less. Then the staff in this department put me in touch with an IP company that manages their IP projects. Warning signs were already flashing at the layers of bureaucracy but I had no choice, I thought, if I try and go at this alone I would be in breach of my contract. So initially this IP company were useful they drew up an NDA which the hospital's chief exec signed and the director of the private company signed and all was good.

Recently I'm starting to question at what stage a revenue sharing deal needs to be hashed out because the app is about to start development and soon its first version will be released. One surgical colleague at work just warned me that he went down the NHS route before when he invented a product - albeit a physical one to be used during surgery. The moral of his story was this NHS IP company are useless, so he got an agreement using an IP lawyer whereby 5% of his share of revenue would go to his employing NHS trust and his product is still in development.

3 months ago I had a great idea, and my colleagues who have heard about it all think it's a brilliant idea and can't wait for it to be released. I'm happy with the development company, I like their iterative approach and their history of delivering successful products. They like the idea and are happy with me, I dedicate a lot of free time to it and have driven it from a thought in my head to an interactive model which should give coders and graphics designers an in depth perspective of what the app will do before they write a single line of code. All that said, the lack of genuine IP protection is frustrating. Half the time I just think, I wish I could make this a massive open source project and all the dreams of profiteering is just a distraction but I can't even find a decent place to pitch it open source!

I've learnt, it's hard to get ideas off the ground and from what I can tell after less than 3 months, I'm moving quite fast but I've come to appreciate that even if you are involved in 21st century innovation, you still can't shake off the old system and especially the layers of bureaucracy in the public sector. There is one solution as someone said above, learn to code but I'm already falling behind in my anaesthetic training. My colleagues might not notice but these side hobbies take a lot of time and effort and I still have a lot to learn in the day job!

So yeh, rant over! If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears.
 
IP is a minefield, if your employer has anything in th contract about IP ownership you really have little apart from getting them completely on board. During my PHD I had a couple of ideas for different startups I fleshed out, analysing development costs, profit margins, recurring revenue, legal waivers, H&S implications, legal issues etc. I didn't feel I was ready to start my own company plus wanted some financial security so I ended up working for a start up instead. Now I can't spend a second thinking of my bussiness ideas because my employer would automatically get IP ownership unless I can clearly prove distinction which is expensive and difficult.


Something important to look at is patents, not your own but existing that you could infringe. Just because a similar app doesn't exist doesn't mean the idea hasn't been protected. Patents can really end up being nasty. Just recently we had someone approach our company stating they have a patent on our technology and we would need to license it. The thing is their patent application post dates the public release of our technology by several years, and there is prior art before our release (which is why we could t patent it), so the legal threat is minimal but our IP lawyer is quoting around $100-150,000 to get the patent overturned. We could ignore the idiot but there is a risk in the future they attempt legal action, which we should easily win but it can have knock in effects. We are several different acquisition negotiations and if they got wind of some supposed patent infringement then they may turn tail, even although the patent shouldn't have been awarded in the first place, we know because we've spent around 100k applying for highly specific patents in slightly different technologies and applications, almost all of which get denied due to prior art.


Which brings me to my last point, you need real investment to have a high chance of succeeding. We burn through around $120K a month, we have raised $1.5million recently but to grow the business our burn rate will increase to $160k a month. So when we might have to pay $150k to get someone's invalid patent removed it is painful for us because our short runway gets ever shorter.
 
There's some mild swearing in it (well, more than mild but the harsher language is bleeped out), but look on YouTube and such for "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Patents (HBO)", some might find it interesting.
 
Investment is not a problem, the company actually told me not to apply for NHS funding. I'm assuming because they want to justify more of the share. Do you work on any projects where the idea comes from some external source and you fund it? At what stage do you work out some sort of deal? Should I be doing that now? And what sort of shape would that deal take. My employer is fully involved, the NDA is between the NHS and this company, I'm just exploring other ways to make it work, because I'm getting no input the NHS IP people since the NDA was drawn up and my hunch is now is the time to sort out contracts before the company starts spending money on development.
 
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