There comes a time in our lives when we have that “BIG IDEA”. However, this big idea might follow some obstacles along the way.
What should you do when developing your dream project? Should you do it all by yourself, wasting time and working on your free hours…
Or should you outsource it to a company that already has done this done a thousand times?
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Full transcript:
John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com. So I got a question here about starting a project. Now this would be a good one to talk about today. This question is from Louis and Louise says, “Hi John, I’m on a big dilemma, had a good idea for an online service and shared with some people I trust. They like to confirm that this is a really good idea and have a chance to hit a homerun with this. My dilemma is do I do this myself with some of the skies, or do I pay someone else to do it for me? Here are the details with each path.
First Louis says, “I’m doing it myself.” I need to do it in my free hours, I need to make a commitment with it but I’ll depend on others to be committed to. I tried this at first but without commitment of course it didn’t go anywhere. This path will probably consume more time and have more risks because I don’t know how to start a business. On the other side, it will cost only my time. The second choice, he says, is paying someone. I found a company that specializes in doing startup projects, they have a 4-month plan to build an MVP minimum viable product and it costs 17K. This price is not a major problem but I’m afraid my idea gets stolen or copied. I don’t know how I can secure my idea in this path. My wife thinks that I need to do it myself. If you can help me with your opinion on this dilemma I’d be grateful.
I think that’s funny that you want to pay the 17K and your wife thinks that you should do it yourself. I tend to agree with your wife, you should do it yourself. Let me tell you why. There’s a few reasons here. One of them is that when you start out doing a project like this, if you haven’t done a project like this before it’s going to be very difficult to outsource it. That 17K that this company promises might balloon up to 20K, 50K. You could end up spending a lot of money. You should always try to do something first before you outsource it to someone else.
If you had said, “Hey John. I’ve built 3 or 4 companies and software products and sold them and now I want to outsource a project and pay this company. Sure, that makes sense, but the fact is that since you haven’t successfully done this before you need to do it because you need to go through and put in the work to create this the first time. I think that that’s the only way that you’re really going to be successful with this and you just have to devote the time. It’s going to require sacrifice. There’s really no shortcut.
When I hear your question here, no offense, but it almost seems like you’re looking for a shortcut. You just want to pay someone 17K and have this thing build for you. Building the thing isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of the problems that you’re going to have with creating a company, especially a software company. You have to market this thing. You have to find people that buy, you have to price it. There’s a whole lot bunch of other stuff rather than just having the product itself.
That’s why you have to be involved with it. You don’t have to get your hands dirty. Once you’ve done this 3 or 4 times, then you can figure out some processes to outsource this. If you want a good book—both on Creating the Process to Outsource this and just doing this yourself to start out, I’d recommend by Michael Gerber it’s called the E-Myth Revisited, really good book. It talks about building a process. It’s what I’ve done a lot with Simple Programmer to build up and the simple program as I have started outsourcing a lot of the things that I do now, but I did everything manually before I ever automated.
It’s the same thing. When you’re building a company. So anyway, I hope that helps you. If you’ve got a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com. If you like this channel, if you like this podcast definitely subscribe and I’ll talk to you next time. Take care.