[ale] Business opportunity...

[Christopher Fowler]

Yep.  My forte is in backend development.  HTML I suck at.  I can not
make a page that looks good.  Presentation is very important.

On Wed, 2004-10-27 at 14:35, David Muse wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 12:14:30 -0400
> George Carless <kafka at antichri.st> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 11:10:06AM -0400, Christopher Fowler wrote:
> > > Many startups do not have the cash to pay salaries or consulting fees. 
> > > In my company I do take a salary but at less than what I was previously
> > > making. The difference it made up in equity.  When someone has equity in
> > > a company they value that company more.  I see it in the way I behave vs
> > > the way our 100% salaried employees behave.  
> > 
> > I understand and agree with all of that.  My point was simply that the poster 
> > seemed to be looking for someone to basically do *all* of the real work in 
> > building out the business, in exchange for part-equity; I was struggling to 
> > see why anyone willing to do that job wouldn't simply do it for themselves 
> > and reap the full benefit.  There's really not much to an "HTML prototype" 
> > and I'd suggest that companies like Google demonstrate that a successful 
> > search site doesn't need much in the way of "look & feel".  To me, the 
> > posting was akin to saying "I'm looking for people to develop and run a 
> > successful product for me; in exchange, I'll provide you with a company name 
> > and a logo".  
> > 
> > Now, to be fair the poster might have the capital for all of the hardware 
> > etc.  But honestly, search engines of any calibre are fairly complicated 
> > things, and I'd be prepared to say that the cost of hardware would be fairly 
> > minimal compared with the cost of development time...
> > 
> > --George
> 
> It's possible that the web-based application that the poster is looking to have
> built is only a small part of the actual business.
> 
> I'm doing a job like this for my dad and brother right now.  They own an
> auto-repair shop in Texas and I'm working on a system for them that allows
> customers to monitor the repair status of their car over the web.  In the end,
> the sytstem is a relatively small part of their actual business.  They know a
> lot about auto repair, and my dad is a good sysadmin, but neither knows how
> to build a web based application.
> 
> As far as HTML prototyping goes... In our case, my wife is a graphic designer.
> She'll be providing me with an HTML prototype of the application.  I'm using a
> template engine to build the site so I'll be able to use the pages that she builds
> for me directly in the application.  We've done the same kind of thing in the past.
> She has always been able to come up with a much more attractive interface than
> I can, and in the past, that's mattered to many of our customers.
> 
> David Muse
> david.muse at firstworks.com
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale