I'm looking for someone to work on it as a passion project WITH ME as a partner/partners.
Time to inject some uncomfortable reality into your plan.
The "idea man" is the least valuable player in such a partnership. Having the idea means nothing if you yourself cannot execute it and you instead require the real talents of someone else to do it for you. Your partnership should not be 50/50 between you the "idea man" and they the actual idea implementer. The best you should hope for is a 10/90 deal where you have a 10% stake (and actually less in my opinion) since you were unable to bring your idea to life on your own. The one who does the work should get the lion's share of the benefits.
Ideas are not the killer app. Killer apps have to be built in order to be killer apps. You lack the necessary skillset to do so. And no, finding/hiring the right skillset is not valuable either. You'd be better off patenting your idea so at least you have something tangible to try to leverage some ownership with since you can't breathe life into your idea yourself. Your idea is just some nebulous form with no sharp definition. You require someone else to add the real details to it because you don't know how to translate your concept into real software. This is why you as the idea man makes you worth very little. The one who actually goes into the minutia of how to make it work is the real idea maker. Got it?
Passion projects are for people who don't really care about the project's timeline or success or eventual usefulness. I don't get the idea that this is what you are really looking for. Instead I see this as a way for you to bring on highly skilled yet cheap labor to do the work you cannot do so you can benefit personally. You have no real value in this arrangement. If it matters to you, then take it on as a passion project yourself while you learn to build software applications on your own. That will make it a real passion project and you will finally bring value to you idea.
It had to be said.
I think that for the most part, that’s a fair criticism.
In terms of raw output in this scenario, yeah, I as only the “idea man”, would have put out the least amount when compared to any devs.
To be fair, you’d also have to add in my other contributions and my actual skill set (digital marketing), but even then I’d be the first to admit that my output even with this considered would be less than any devs.
And yet, the shit doesn’t exist and would never exist without the idea to build it in the first place. And even if it did, it still takes marketing chops to grow it after the fact.
So, I think there’s something to be said about “value” as it relates to direct output, but that’s not the same thing as “value” as it relates to things which have nothing to do with direct output, but which are still mission critical to any project actually coming to fruition, much less being successful after the fact.
In any case, I get your point. It’s easy for me to ask for someone else to give their time upfront for no cost when the time I would give is much less in comparison…at least upfront. But for me, I would then be giving my time upfront with my professional skill set after the product is created..people like everyone here who don’t even know me would be skeptical (and rightfully so) that I would actually do this, and so it would require a big dose of passion and faith from anyone on the dev side to commit to such a thing.
This entire trial balloon of me floating the idea has been instructive in many ways.
While I wish I had the time and such to dedicate to learning to “build it myself”, I just don’t.
So it looks as though I will likely either have to pony up the cash upfront to pay someone to build it or it will just sit in mothballs indefinitely, perhaps forever.
Or, if we are lucky, some dev will think of the same idea and build it themselves.
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