Beating the wannabe dot-com entrepreneurs at their own game.
Innovation requires a different kind of approach. There are many people over the years who have profound vision yet lack the ability to deliver on their ideas. I have meet my share over the years. Building technology into a website is only part of the process, and yet without it companies can not launch. It takes months of design work, planning, and execution to make a profound and relevant technology / innovative solution for the market place.
Over the years I have dealt with clients and partners who have big lofty goals of making it big on the web. They hear of geeks launching massive sites and only if they too could find a way to make internet millions from their half baked ideas. Its a fools erand to think someone who knows nothing about technology can become a technologist over night , just because they have a website and a logo.
I can assure you i have seen it time and again, even worked with these kinds of people. I would love to share with you a few stories about many of them in some posts. Lets just say that the delusional and often times misguided dreams of simply dreamers can take us to places of understanding about human psychology that we never really wanted to lean in the first place.
Take for example a recent client. A Seattle startup who’s quote “Founder” can from a little town in the mid-west, they had some fancy idea of building the next best social networking tool since sliced bread. They had a small budget yet, couldn’t find any company worth their salt to build it. They hunted around and pitched investors on a “Pie in the sky” idea, and all the investors simply said “Build it, and then we will talk”. So they contacted me. Here is where I made my mistake. I knew that it would cost nearly a half million to properly design and build this project, but their supposed connections would raise funding at a later point in time.
Well i underbid the prototype because I saw that these people had a few of the pieces, I knew that I would bring a massive technology and innovative approach to the project. I saw this simply as an investment opportunity. In the end, I found that this company was simply looking to get rich quick, didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to run a software company or dot.com for the least part, and inevitably failed in honoring the contract i had with them.
I found that working with their failed business model and ” amateur “ team that they put together from a few weeks of Craigslist resume poaching, gave me a headache. Not only did they have un realistic ideas about the cost of software development, but they had misguided ideas about the delivery timelines, of the technology. Understanding the software development cycle is a basic failure of many non-technical start up entrepreneurs. The non-technical team members rarely bring very much to the table early on, besides a handful of ideas and and a lot of baggage. Be sure to negotiate your position in a startup that respects your skill level and contributions.
There are numerous examples where dealing with non-technical clients or potential business partners can bite you in the proverbial rear-end. Be sure to analyze your risk and the benefits thoroughly before undertaking this kind of venture. In the future I plan to write some enlightening essays on how to avoid these blatant con-artists and get rich quick schemers. There are thousands of them out there and for you the entrepreneurial software architect there are a few lesson I am sure you will find educational and entertaining.
Check back soon for the case studies and low down on how to avoid these kinds of non-technical “IDEA ” people. I will point out some of the red flags and what you should do given a failure or breach of contract with these “free-loaders”. Until the next time, keep on doing what you do. Ciao.
