The other day on of our readers Joey sent us an interesting email, about an issue he is facing taking his idea to the next level. As this is a frequent question, we thought we’d share it here.

Joey wrote:

I am a young entrepreneur, and I stumbled across this site today.
You have a great thing going on here.
I have a question, simple to ask maybe more difficult to answer.
I have a lot of my layout done in the physical realm. I’m an idea person. I
play music and I’m busy savvy.

Where do most of these website start-ups find their programmers?
Its hard to believe the idea people themselves are all computer-savvy.

I’m very passionate, full of enthusiasm, and have a partner who is an amazing
computer person. She’s very busy though right now,
so I need to find trustworthy and passionate programmers to work with me as
freelancers.

An answer would mean the world to me!
Thank you for this website ;),
Joey

There are many stumbling blocks to starting a web projects, and unless you come from a technical background you will need to either find partners for a joint venture, or look to hire a freelancer or agency to build your website or project (you can also buy a few books and start learning, but we’ll focus on some practical approaches for the time poor).

Finding a joint venture partner is an ideal way to minimize your risk, and is an excellent way to get your project kick started. The best place to get started is in your group of friends, work colleagues, or by checking out the forums available for your topic.

In a joint venture partnership, each member can focus on their core speciality, and because you will be sharing revenues there is an incentive for all parties involved to contribute. The advantage here is that you won’t have to invest in web development, design, SEO, marketing, PR which means you could launch a project much sooner, and at lower cost than if you were flying solo.

Another popular option available is to hire a freelancer. You can either hire a local professional by placing an ad in a local paper, or you can use websites such as Elance.com, gumtree.com, or sitepoint.com. Look out for design contests, and users with a high post count or recommendations.

You can also attract some great talent by targeting your local colleges and universities, students are always on the lookout for after study work, or work experience to pad out their CV’s.

There are many skilled professionals specialising in every area, which you can hire on a hourly or project basis which can provide you with some great work at low cost. Elance is a great starting point, as you can review each provider’s CV, and view feedback from previous projects.
Make sure you consider the provider’s expertise, the feedback received, as well as the location where the provider is from. Also, be prepared to spend more time micro managing, and reviewing when dealing with non English natives, or bargain basement quotes!

Another option available is to use an agency, although this is usually a more expensive option, agencies can provide many additional skills to the table, and their experience can prove beneficial for growing your Start-up. Alas not all agencies are born equal, so make sure you always ask for references from happy customers.

Raphael Mudge the founder of Dashnine Media contacted us about his latest venture, Feedbackarmy.com

Usability testing, user reviews and focus groups are recommended to ensure the success of your projects, and will enable the identification of problems and issues early on. Unfortunately usability testing can be expensive, and finding the right user sample, organising user surveys, can be time consuming and over the budget of many smaller startups (and many large companies!).

Feedback Army takes usability testing to the next level, and enables you to submit a website, survey questions, and get up to 50 responses within days - Not weeks.

Feedback Army taps into crowdsourcing through the Amazon Mechanical Turk webservice, which enables it to leverage an on-demand and scalable workforce which is paid per HIT (or task). This is a great way to get access to a huge workforce, which can execute tasks within minutes for a few $$$.

Feedback Army sent us an invitation to try out their service, and within two minutes we had submitted our survey. We checked again a day later, and we had 10 responses waiting full of interesting feedback from users - Not bad!

The service starts at $7 for 10 up to $33 for 50 responses - This is really affordable, and you will find that this is a great way of getting real world feedback at short notice - Ideal for testing anything from offers, landing pages, websites, the possibilities area endless.

One element I would suggest to be added to the service would be an option to segment responses by demographic - answers from 10 random users has value, but feedback from targeted users is ultimately more powerful.

So don’t delay, check out the service at feedbackarmy.com and use it to improve your products, services, and websites.

Hello Entrepreneurs, and Happy New Year! 2008 was has seen radical changes in the world, many friends, contacts, companies have had to cut down their operations, and many have had to face difficult situations. But with change comes opportunity, and I have seen some great examples laid off staff building their own projects and startups, and finaly starting what they always wanted to do in the first place!

With the economy in crisis, and a new year ahead of us its time for reflection, new resolutions, as well as planning for the year ahead.

So what is Indie Startups going to be doing in 2009?

Well, first off we are back from holiday, therefore will be able to blog more frequently about the latest bootstrapped startups, and inspirational projects going around. Also I am very keen on helping startups take their projects to the next level, so will be publishing a series of guides covering important topics from finding good JV partners, to building your audience, and ensuring that your project either generates revenue or looks attractive to investors.

Also this blog is very much about your startup projects - Therefore use our contact form to let us know about your projects so that we can feature the best ones and get you added coverage.

I got a great email today from Andres Krogh giving us a heads up about his new site called iamsaintnick.com which allows relatives to find out what their loved ones want for Christmas.

His elevator pitch goes as follows: “Folks can go to the site, punch in a phone number, and have Santa go call that person to covertly get gift ideas.  The call happens live on the site, and the call is recorded for the user to hear after the Santa recon is complete.”

Iamsaintnick was developed by Matt Steckler, a developer who recently lost his job at a tech startup two months ago, and designed by Andres Krogh. The telephony is powered by Twilio which was launched a only a few days ago see our review here.

What is truly impressive is that a few days after the launch of Twilio, Matt and Andres designed, spec’d, and built iamsaintnick from the ground up in the 4 days since their public launch…Well done guys

The only issue we could find was that they don’t yet announce that the call is recorded, which is a requirement in some States, and is especially important when dealing with children. But it sounds like this will be added soon. Edit: There is now a mention at the beginning of the phone call that says “this call is being recorded” to try and make it extra clear.

Check it out at iamsaintnick.com, its a great little seasonal project which has lots of potential (voice recognition product suggestions maybe?) which should give you some ideas of how you can leverage the recently launched Twilio in your own applications.

Twilio launched in private beta last week (and is now available for all), and is promising to bring some radical changes to web telephony services by enabling web developers through its simple REST API, and a simple pay as you go billing philosophy.

Thanks to Twilio you no longer have to deal with complex infrastructures, telecom programming languages, and stacks of PBX software to implement inbound and outbound phone applications.

Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that while many other web telephony services already exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands.

The Twilio REST API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions:

• Say
• Play
• Record
• Dial
• Gather a phone number

Thanks to these, its very easy to replicate some of GrandCentral’s core functionality in only around 15 lines of code!

Twilio is adopting the cloud service model, where no contracts are required and where you are charged flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed.

We really like Twilio, as it has comoditized what used to be a dark art which usually involved a lot of hardware, software and lines of complex code to achieve. Plus its a perfect example of a really attractive startup prime for an aquisition, featuring a great idea, great packaging, a talented team, and some great team experience (CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

Check it out at Twilio.com