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.

What I find most impressive is how much Calum has achieved in such a short space of time. Starting pplparty when he was just 15 he now heads up a 10 man team in his London office.

At 17 I went to work for Doug Richard (one of BBC2’s Dragons from Dragons Den) and his team for mobile texting company Trutap. I was working alongside world-class people with backgrounds ranging in companies such as Yahoo, Ebay and T-mobile.

When I first started the business I was working from my bedroom at my parents house whilst doing my GCSEs, then I had our whole team working from my front room until just a few months ago when we moved into office space.

In the time since the pplparty launch in 2005 the site has gained a fair bit of traction currently boasting over 400,000 members. Whilst it still has a fair way to go to make a dent in some of the big boys it seems to have a thriving community and should continue to grow with the recent sexy rebrand.

It’s a simple concept that isn’t completely ground breaking but I really like the way they’ve stripped down all the unnecessary features and kept everything simple and to the point. I managed to setup an account and start chatting in under a minute.

Here’s me testing the site with Mike from WPcandy.

I dropped the sites owner an email and he was more than happy to give me a bit more information on where the idea for the site came from.

There is one very important thing to keep in mind. The future of human development, as electronics, computers and machines take more and more jobs that humans did in the past, is – simplicity of use and not complexity! More simple the devices, software and hardware will be, while focusing on core functionality, more things you will be able to do. When I was studying engineering I remember when we went to visit an underground coal mine, and conditions for both workers and engineers were awful. So, I thought to myself, why are all these people here? Through simple global collaboration of individual technicians and engineers where they can quickly exchange 3D data and talk live a consortium could be set up and massive robotic mining systems could be manufactured to replace at least half of those people under ground, while they could be sent to surface to control those robots through network channels. Each worker could thus dig more ore and do less work.

I really like this site and service. I’ll be using it for sure.

Qbox has found a way to utilize this massive collection of music.

Our player essentially works like a remote control that lets you take control of all the social network music available for streaming.

There is also a desktop application that I unfortunately couldn’t test (I’m on a mac and currently it’s windows only) but this video outlines some of the features of the software.

Rifflet was produced for $0, in roughly two weeks, from idea to launch. It’s a great example of a solid idea executed very well for very little cash.

I heard from the sites founders, Jon and Kelly. They we’re more than helpful with helping me source this post.

It’s amazing how fast the Riffflet community is growing, and every day we hear from people about how much they love the site. We just had one member produce the first song built out of pieces on the site, so we’ve actually help something get created, which is really exciting.

I love little startups like this. They noticed a gap and they produced something quality for very little money to fill it. If more people were doing this the Internet would be a much better place.

There is already some good stuff going on over there. If you’re a musician check them out.

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.

Brain child of John Blazer and built over a 2 month period working on weekends.

Other dating sites ask you all these survey questions, trying to find a perfect match for you based on a full set of criteria. I realized there’s a market for people who just want a quick fling with a very small footprint. Usually they are seeking a discreet sexual encounter.

On FlingMix.com, a user can literally search for a user and map them by distance within only a few feet. There might be another user in the hotel room next to you and you can see them on the map. You can email them immediately. No sign up, no registration, no credit cards – just a direct email. It’s similar to craigslist’s implementation of anonymous emails. You can be sending an email to an interested user in two clicks.

I spent a few minutes messing about with the system and it is pretty solid.

The site has all the features you’d expect to find on a site like this but flingmix seems to do what most other personal listing sites do in a very elegant way + the added google maps implementation.

John managed to keep startup costs considerably down by developing the site and system himself. To date he has only spent around $50.

One of the main selling points of this site is that it is free. That said, the money has to be made somewhere. Currently the site relies on revenue from adverts as it’s only source of income. The way the email server is setup means that when people send messages to user-xxxxx@flingmix.com (a unique email generated for each listing, keeping your real email address a secret) John can attach an advert to the footer of an email before it is delivered. It’s nothing amazingly new but i’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs would have missed this opportunity.

It’s a pretty sweet site and i’m sure it fills a gap in the (arguably saturated) market.

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.

So what’s different about siftd?
The main difference with siftd is the algorithm. Currently the algorithm gives equal weight to stories in specific categories meaning it takes a story from each section and promotes it to the front page based on its popularity from the upcoming section. The algorithm also keeps too many stories from a single section from making it to the front page. In theory you should get a more diverse range of stories being promoted.

I asked Brian Rubash, one of the site owners how he came up with the idea.

We have been (and still are) long time users and fans of digg.com and have watched it’s transition from a tech news site to a more diverse site. By late last year it was increasingly evident that digg wasn’t going to return to what it used to be so we set about to create something that could provide a similar experience to the tech crowd, and other demographics, without compromising any group’s experience. We also looked at sites beyond Digg for features that impressed us, and features that made everything easier for the user. We have been called a Digg clone, but I think we really offer something more, and that really goes back to our goal of working for our users.

Siftd isn’t the first to follow digg’s voting model of making stories more popular (see mixx and reddit) but the system they have is solid. It’s going to be very interesting to see if they can get any traction at all and start stealing users away from digg but I personally think they may have shot themselves in the foot a little bit by branding themselves so similarly to digg. Usually (in my experience) to make any impact on a market that is already being dominated by some big players you need to offer something drastically new to get any attention at all.

While this might not be useful to a lot of tech-savvy people there is definitely a market for it. Everyone wants their little part of the internet and this service makes that easy. It’s also a great model for promotion with each group owner promoting their specific group and in-turn, promoting the main intodit website.

I spoke with Maurice Sikkink and found out a bit more about the service.

I have a few small communities running on very targeted niches, like home interior pictures and gardening. These sites only allow users to upload their home interior and garden pictures and create a profile. I wanted to create something that people could use to do more than only uploading pictures, so I thought people should be able to create a group for their own interest niche and fill it the blanks the way they want it.

Maurice has developed the entire site himself and to date has only spent $5 on the domain name (excluding server costs).