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.

As internet users become more and more cautious of where they spend their cash in light of the economic downturn, the bigger the impact of website and product review websites in the purchase process. Who will you trust Dell, or some smaller firm selling desktop PC’s online?

Well we’ve had a look at Trustpilot, and this decision might become a whole lot easier. This innovative UK startup have launched a reputation monitoring service based on user comments and reviews, which are then presented to users through their website and their browser app which overlays a trust rating on top of Google results.

Checking out user reviews for a website becomes as easy as reading the colour of an icon that changes from red to green will give you an indication of how trustworthy a given company is, and by placing your pointer over that icon where additional information is displayed.

The information provided includes the percentage of approval the company has, the actual number of reviews as well as a “TrustScore”

Check it out at Trustpilot.co.uk.

The system is surprisingly solid and is very easy to use. It’s one of those sites that you can happily mess around with for ages.

You can view the epic .gif I created here.

Joe Daley, the sites founder, filled me in with a bit more info.

I started the site around nine months ago, I hired a guy to help with the part of the code that saves the .gif, I knew this was an important piece of the project, the first version took a minute to save the photos, 2nd version 30 secs, still not good enough so we worked another 2 months and finally now it takes only 2 to 5 secs to save a photo.

I always tried to keep these things in mind when building blingeasy.

1. clean interface
2. easy to use and understand.
3. make it fast, fast, fast!

The flash editor was a huge challenge also, we had to optimize gifs as they are loaded so they load fast inside the editor and are not to big once they are placed on the photo.
really the whole project was a huge challenge mentally and physically, I basically had my mind made up I would not stop until it was done right. We went back to the drawing board many times to redo functions and code.

Duncan Riley covered BlingEasy with a blog post entitled “BlingEasy: So bad It’s Actually Good” and I’d have to agree with him. This website certainly isn’t for everyone but for the select few that this does appeal to I’m sure it’s a godsend.

1) Most folks don’t need venture funding in the early stages

2) the odds of first-time entrepreneurs actually raising VC is pretty low.

Oh, and 3) it’s one of the least fun activities an entrepreneur can take. Raising funding is often harder than building a product/business — and much less fun!

…

The simple answer is no, I have not changed my mind on VC. I still don’t think most early-stage entrepreneurs should go out on the venture fund-raising circuit. They should maintain the option of a modest exit. Focus on solving the customer’s problem (not the VC’s problem). My situation with HubSpot was special. I had already done the bootstrap thing (multiple times) and made money. I had above average odds of raising money for HubSpot.

So, why did I raise funding? Because, this time around I wanted to take a shot at the big leagues. Sure, any success (even a modest one) is nice. But a modest success is not going to change my life much at this point. I want to swing hard. It’s not about the money. It’s about the fun and excitement of pursuing a really big idea, working with really smart people and doing what I love. [And, of course, the money won't hurt either]

And that, my friends, is why I raised $17 million in venture funding.

Once again, full article at OnStartups.

Springraise isn’t quite let yet (launching May 21st) but you can see a preview of the app below.

So how does it work?

1. Enter your full background and employment information (past and present)
2. View your career over time to see how you compare to others like you
3. See the careers of others like you (in one click) and compare your career to theirs
4. Perform scenarios to see your career prospects
5. Discuss with others to learn how they made their career decisions

This video should give you a bit more of an insight to the concept and idea. I’m looking forward to seeing this one in action.

If you hadn’t already guessed the site boasts a massive selection of free to download desktop backgrounds. I spoke with 21 year old Harry Maugans this morning and found out a bit more information about the origins of Desktop Nexus.

A long time ago I ran a BMW forum, and we had a small wallpaper section. Well, that section grew shockingly fast, and I realized the demand out there for good wallpaper sites (not many exist). After that realization, I set out on a two year campaign to create the top source for computer wallpapers online. We want to become the household brand name, where everyone goes first (and last) whenever they get tired of their computer background.

This new version has taken almost a year to complete (the first, basic version took roughly two months). I’ve been messing around with the system for the past little while and there are some really quality wallpapers over there. It’s also a very useful site for finding twitter backgrounds.

If you feel your desktop background is a little un-inspired, head over to Desktop Nexus and change it.

There have been lots of domain search tools out for as long as I can remember but domize concentrates heavily on speed. Dubbed by mashable as “The Fastest Domain Name Search ever” and I would have to agree.

You just start typing in a domain name and the domains are checked on the fly. If domains are indeed taken you can hover your mouse over the extension and a nice little preview of the site is popped up.

This is useful because sometimes taken domains have “for sale” landing pages which you can check very quickly.

The site was developed by Genbook product director Anson Parker. I exchanged a few emails with Anson and he told me a bit more about the story behind Domize.

I built Domize as a side project over a few nights because I wanted a faster, simpler way to look up domain names. I am often brainstorming ideas for web applications and always enjoy finding a free .com domain name to go along with that idea. I have only ever built out a few of these projects, but have somehow collected around 50 domain names in the process.

While there were already some ‘instant’ domain name tools out there, I found them clunky, full of ads and basically just no fun to use. There are also concerns that some of these tools are simply a way for people to steal ideas for good domain names, which is why I wanted to make Domize an encrypted SSL application by default.

Domize also has support for iphone users so you can check for available domains anywhere. It’s a very useful tool so check it out.

Jim had the idea about two years ago after being dissatisfied with the current listing options in Chicago.

I was trying to find a list of thrift stores in Chicago a few years ago, and I was unable to find a decent list anywhere on the internet- I found this surprising. Also, I have always been annoyed by most of the existing local search options, as when I search for ‘coffee’ I get about 20 Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. I found this frustrating, because in Chicago we are lucky to have lots of excellent places that roast their own beans, but they are always buried in search listings. I wanted it to be easy to find the places that make Chicago a unique, interesting place to live.

It’s really great to see startups harnessing the knowledge of groups of people to help other people, and small businesses out. The indylist does this wonderfully.

To date the only money spent has been on hosting although I was told that if someone wanted a similar site developed it would have cost roughly $15k.

Starting off on his own, Jim is now working with 3 others on the website. Justin Siddons, Jon Sestak, and Phil Kalas. Justin handles the graphic design work, Jim does the programming, and Phil and Jon are taking care of the business and marketing aspects of the site.

It’s a great little startup and they’re doing some good things that are benefiting a lot of people. If you live in or are planning on visiting Chicago check them out and give them some love.

There were also some other great videos that are worth checking out. (Be warned, I spent almost an entire evening watching these so only check them out if you have some time to kill). You can check out the other videos here.

I’m sure you’ll agree, he makes some very good points. Make something people want, charge money for it, profit. Although it does make it sound frighteningly easy.

Remember: If you have any information on a bootstrapped startup please, please contact us.