I'm a 30 year old with no experience, I want to build a startup

13 points by chamboo 13 years ago | 49 comments

I spent 276 days trying to figure out what to do with my life, I still don't have an answer.

I have no experience in programming, nor do I have delusions about becoming an elite programmer. I just would like to learn enough to have a better filter to notice/process ideas as mentioned here: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

I have decided to commit to learn programming at a base level, enough to possibly make prototypes/potential to find co-founder.

I left a previous job that paid well for many years because 1.I wasn't talented and 2.I did not see my life as being fulfilled down that path.

A couple points for your consideration

1. I have over 1mm liquid, and I have no debt, don't own a house or car. This may be tacky to mention, but since I am anonymous, I just wanted to put it out there out of desperation in hopes someone can give me some solution (wishful thinking).

2. No one depends on me, I have as many hours as there are in a day to work on this.

I started doing some html work on code academy, it seemed a bit slow and thorough for what I'm trying to do. I looked at Zed Shaw's courses, and they seem like a good idea, but I'm not sure if it's overkill (or underkill?) for what my goals are.

If any of this makes sense, you would SIGNIFICANTLY help me by giving me guidance to help achieve my goal. I don't want to waste time learning things that I really won't need to know (near term).

I have searched much, but not knowing what I need to know, it is hard to discern what is and isn't necessary. (In terms of the base goal).

Maybe I am not cut out to be a founder. But I do know that reading pg's essays make my mind run wild, and I find instant inspiration and excitement in his writings. I have spent 276 days trying to figure out something else, and nothing is jumping out at me. So it's about time to make some sort of a commitment. For better or for worse.

argimenes 13 years ago |

In my experience it is not unusual that an intelligent, ambitious, and creative person finds themselves at a crossroad in their late twenties. Perhaps it began in adolescence, even childhood, where they knew that they had an above-average intelligence and a mind open to possibilities -- but, at the same time, a grave sense of self doubt existed, which only grew year by year as ambitious projects floundered and others (who to appearances were less intelligent or at least less imaginative) thrived. This can reach a crisis point in the late twenties, when the options for avoidance begin to dry up -- and one is faced with the increasing reality of finding work, starting a career, etc.

This can be a frightening moment -- but it is also a liberating moment, viewed correctly. At this point the self's ego-image -- the set of core beliefs about who you are, what you are destined for, how 'intelligence' and 'success' are defined -- come into conflict with the reality principle. This is naturally a very painful moment (drawn across months and even years). It is also an opportunity to redefine these core beliefs -- to reexamine them -- to ask yourself what are your fundamental assumptions about intelligence, creativity, success.

In my own experience, and watching similar-minded friends, this crisis point is a fundamental conflict between what we THINK intelligence, creativity, and genius is -- and what we actually see in ourselves. On the one hand we "know" that we are smart, imaginative -- on the other, the reality principle demands proof and evidence. But here is the paradox: this very belief in intelligence creates its own contradictions. For example, if you believe that smart people are smart because they do clever things easily -- then your brain can start to believe that if you find something hard to do, it is proof of your stupidity. The brain then finds ways to avoid this painful conflict between ego-image and reality -- by dreaming up great ambitions and projects, but then shying away from realising them. Or, you can develop an aversion to "lesser work" -- which reinforces a belief that you are innately special and "above that".

The problem is in the core assumptions one makes about worth -- examining these assumptions deeply, being open to see the paradoxes in them, the hypocrisies even, can reveal avenues out of the situation. You can find practical things to do -- this in turn can build real confidence, not ego-confidence. Work seems then less like 'drudgery' and more like the slow and steady strengthening of your powers.

Just some thoughts...

chamboo 13 years ago | |

"For example, if you believe that smart people are smart because they do clever things easily -- then your brain can start to believe that if you find something hard to do, it is proof of your stupidity. The brain then finds ways to avoid this painful conflict between ego-image and reality -- by dreaming up great ambitions and projects, but then shying away from realising them. Or, you can develop an aversion to "lesser work" -- which reinforces a belief that you are innately special and "above that"

This is me. It seems very complicated to overcome such a thing, as some of the assumptions seem rational. What do you deem as 'practical things to do'? (Or do you have any examples of this?)

Also thanks for this. I don't know what to say, but this hits home rather hard.

bones6 13 years ago | | |

My advice would be do something seriously FUN as a first project. Do you have a hobby that could be a springboard? For example, I love Radio-Controlled stuff. So a project could be arduino controlled R/C car/drone. A little coding and a little wiring with real results. It's not trivial, but it's not over the top difficult either. That's my example, but try to get a concrete project to tackle. You will learn what you need to learn in the journey to finish it.

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Would love to talk to you a bit more about this. This is very much a real issue for me, and I would like to further understand what you mean by finding practical things to do, etc. I would greatly appreciate any further response. Thank you.

argimenes 13 years ago | | |

Definitely happy to talk further. Not sure how we can get in touch privately in this forum -- if that's not possible, drop me an email to anonimoheynonnyno@gmail.com

mbesto 13 years ago |

Hi!

I've tried to do what you, and after about 6 months of trying to get myself to fully code, I fell flat. But I still really wanted to build a business and have slowly realized what I enjoy most - finding the easiest route to acquiring customers by building a MVP.

I now have a team of 3 (biz dev, web dev, and UI) could build you an MVP for around $15-20k. It will help you validate a lot of your assumptions and help flesh out any idea you may have.

More importantly, I believe it will help you jump start the journey of what you want to focus on. You will get exposure and advice to the 3 core elements of starting an internet business - web development, business development, and user experience. Which, if all done properly mean acquiring customers.

Contact details in profile if you're interested! Good luck either way!

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Thanks for your support. I will keep your contact info, and keep it in mind as I progress down this path. Hopefully I will be in touch soon.

mbesto 13 years ago | | |

Happy to help. Even if means just talking on the phone to understand better what you want to do! Everyone's passionate about something different.

JimWillTri 13 years ago |

I was in your position financially and career-wise - just hated what I was doing. Gave a little thought to coding but decided I had plenty of money to just hire people to complete the project. Went to every dev firm in the US who I thought had the skills. Most quoted around $25k - which would be great but I dint believe they could do it.

Instead went to a firm in SV that wanted $54k. They had worked on a large prior project so I thought they could get it done. They couldn't even get the first milestone complete after giving then two times the allotted time. Fired them.

Finally found my own people and launched 5 months ago and going great. I would suggest finding some good people on HN.

chamboo 13 years ago | |

I'm very happy to hear that you're doing it. For a very long period, I started to give up hope (and I had never even attempted anything). I would very much like to find some people here. Can you say what you are working on building?

bones6 13 years ago | | |

Depending on what your project is, there are plenty of coders to be found overseas. If you want to be a programmer, be a programmer and put in the time to learn what you need from the beginning. If you want to build your idea now, hire a team and manage them best you can. With your money, I personally would have already hired a few teams to work on different projects. None of my ideas I would outsource are exactly super-ambitious or groundbreaking but are things I would like to have as sources of passive income that would give me a bit more freedom. I've got to say Trello makes it so easy to handle projects like this, from the few small projects I have managed with outsourcers.

JimWillTri 13 years ago | | |

It's very difficult to find good programmers. I would suggest finding someone on HN that has a very good rep and using him to sort through and find quality ones. One of the biggest challenges is that, even when you find quality programmer(s), most will attempt to outsource to crappy devs. I found out that the sv dev firm I hired, outsourced to $4.50 hour ukraine devs on odesk.

cjbenedikt 13 years ago | |

that's exactly what I meant by "there are excellent devs out there, find your mission/passion and spend some of your cash on it"

runjake 13 years ago |

This is going to sound like an insult, but it truly isn't:

In my mind, you obviously don't want to a put a lot of research into it -- as if you did, you'd just read everything you could, and get an MVP going -- instead of posting this. Don't worry, I'm often the same way. I suppose it's a sense of urgency.

So you might look into DevBootCamp (http://devbootcamp.com/). It doesn't mean you have to be an RoR programmer forever, but you gain coding skills and contacts in a relatively short amount of time. You have the cash and time.

notintegral 13 years ago | |

I expect DevBootCamp to fail like all other things with which Michael Staton is involved. Staton is the type of entrepreneur who screws over countless other individuals in order to achieve his own success; he pretends to help edtech companies with the sole goal of advancing his own agenda, and his own product -- Inigral -- is rarely used by the universities or the students who pay for it. All in all, Michael Staton is one of those wantrepreneurs who advances because of his success as a "socialite" (in his own words) rather than any prowess, intellectual ability, or entrepreneurial talent.

chamboo 13 years ago | |

It doesn't. Part of the reason is urgency, and part of the reason is not fully trusting what I have found with my research (or not knowing if there is something better, and maybe I am missing out). I thought about this before posting, as I don't wish to shirk my own responsibilities, but from your response and others, I am glad that I decided to post, it has been very helpful and encouraging for me. Is there any reason this boot camp might be better than the others? I do not know anyone who has attended these camps.

GioM 13 years ago |

>I started doing some html work on code academy, it seemed a bit slow and thorough for what I'm trying to do.

Upon reflecting on my professional life, I found that most of my problems were caused by trying to run before I could walk. I needed to learn patience in order to make myself into the person that I desperately wanted to become (These days, I'm still working at it, but I'm making great progress). The crux of the matter is that it's easy to think of awesome things to make, but hard to put in the time to learn how to make them. Take the time to learn, and although you may find that what you wanted to make is not achievable, you will see other possibilities and opportunities open up for you.

With regard to beginner-level resources, I have had some great success with oreilly's headfirst series (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/series/head-first.do) They provide an excellent, quick, entry point into a subject, and enough base knowledge that you can expand on your own (and you will have to - they're beginner books). Combine these books and your future learning with diligent note-taking (via Evernote) and you will have a searchable and very useable database that will serve you well.

Good luck, and I hope it works out for you.

kevin_rubyhouse 13 years ago |

Hey how's it going?

Sounds like you're in a great spot to pursue a goal, as soon as you've settled on what you'd like to do.

How did the programming go over the past 276 days? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3964837) How did your prototype come out?

I somewhat agree with cjbenedikt about investing. The issue though is that without actually experiencing startup or being in the trenches with technology it is harder to filter/process ideas that people talk to you about.

You're cut out to be a founder if you are consistently applying effort to improving yourself as an entrepreneur/in business. Persistence is key, because that way you can eventually navigate all the obstacles to building a successful company, something I've managed only to a minor degree.

I won't presume to give you any advice besides that. What I can help you out with though is getting a solid start to learning how to program. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions, especially related to programming (front-end, back-end, software, architecture, mobile, games... anything) at kevin.stubbs at therubyhouse dot com.

P.S.

With apparently all the time in the world, don't worry about learning too much programming. Just work your ass off at it and you'll be a fair enough programmer for your needs soon enough. (I prefer overkill courses too.)

mswen 13 years ago |

Over the past 14 months I have put myself through the same self-learning process with a similar goal. Be able to build full working prototypes of the web app ideas in my head. I am fully aware that if one of these start to get some customer traction I will need to have a more experienced dev help me deal with a whole variety of issues from scalability to security and a designer to help with UI/UX and visual appeal.

Although I had read a couple of books and tried some tutorials none of it really felt like it stuck until I just started building a site that I wanted. Even though it isn't the most systematic education, each piece that you learn is focused on solving a current problem.

As I look back over the year, I have learned a reasonable amount of HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL and just enough of deploying to a LAMP stack at my hosting company so that I can get sites up and running.

It sounds really daunting, and there were some really hard days this last year, but if you stay focused on solving one or two chunks of the overall problem at a time you can work your way through it.

I now can now do what I set out to do, which is build full working prototype sites. I have several demos deployed and am starting pilot implementations with customers on two of the sites.

I don't know your technical background or formal training. My own background was pretty technical but not web development. Even if your background is not technical, there are plenty of examples of people with Liberal Arts backgrounds and teens teaching themselves do do web development.

Another possibility for you, is to try to go to one of the dev bootcamps, you commit 12 weeks of undivided intense concentration under the tutoring of experienced developers. This would quickly get you a foundation.

Best of luck

chamboo 13 years ago | |

I basically have no technical background other than basic engineering, but nothing software related. On the bootcamps, do you personally know anyone who attended and recommended a specific one? I thought about doing this, but I heard mixed reviews (I know there are quite a few now).

mswen 13 years ago | | |

I don't know anyone who has gone through one of these dev bootcamps - but in the grand scheme of things 12 weeks of intense effort under some guidance is a relatively small investment to give you a feel for whether not you have the talent and enduring interest to go down the route of building out the skills to be the technical founder yourself.

Even if you decide that doing the web development yourself isn't all that exciting, you will now be in a much better position to evaluate other programmers that you hire to execute your vision.

hipsters_unite 13 years ago |

>"it seemed a bit slow and thorough for what I'm trying to do"

Okay, so as somebody who quit their job to learn to code (I just didn't realise that was what I was doing at the time), I'll say: if you are going to code you have to be thorough. Codeacademy is a good start. I began by doing pretty much everything on that site in a couple of 8hrs/day 7-day weeks. From there, Treehouse, Zed, books, blogs, StackOverflow... there are a hundred ways.

Bottom line: if you want to be a technical founder you've got to commit to learning the hard way, be passionate and determined. Non-technical, you should read and type along to something like Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial book so at least you've got your hands dirty with code and can understand how it works when working with a co-founder. For a brief intro to simple web apps, you might try the Essential PHP with MySQL course on Lynda.com as you can see the inner workings of CRUD etc.

I've been at it six months and I can hang out with devs and talk shop, no problems. You could probably get to where I've done quicker too. Good luck!

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Thanks for these resources, never heard of the Rails tutorial, will definitely check it out. What area of the world do you live?

shail 13 years ago |

Hey

Would you be interested in joining another startup, like mine, as a cofounder? I am the only founder.

As a suggestion, you should join a startup (not necessarily mine) and since you are not burdened by the thought of securing your next meal, you can really take much bigger challenges, much higher risk (in terms of time, not necessarily money).

For instance, I see a lot of people saying release early, go to market asap, but I somehow feel the otherwise and I agree that's a risky approach but not totally unworthy.

Just a suggestion.

I am looking for cofounder currently, someone who is willing to take risk (a lot of it) so if it suits your appetite, then you are welcome. I do not expect any money from you, will not pay you ad expect you to take care of your expenses until we secure a round or go profitable.

As far as what I am working on, I am elaborating a lot on it because that does not matter. Personalities should match first.

Contact me: shail2@live.com if interested. I am based in India.

lifeisstillgood 13 years ago |

1mm liquid implies you are actually a lot better at the "reality" thing than you might think.

And being a programmer is a necessary but not sufficient part of being a founder.

I would suggestto you the HN Proposition approach:

http://hnproposition.blogspot.co.uk/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5037694

Basically - you seed a hacker with 5000 USD to build their MVP, then you seed yourself to promote it, SEO it, sell it basically. Its essentially a way to buy an MVP. It may work really well - it may not, but whatever, you seem in the right place to do it.

You will benefit from learning to code no matter what, but right now I suspect you need to hustle. And trying to sell three or four new startups, birth them into the world, is certainly going to do that for you.

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Thanks for this, I did see this earlier. I will certainly consider this option as I progress.

klaut 13 years ago |

I would suggest you to do this:

First, ask yourself why you want to learn programming. Is it something that really excites you? Go watch some of the Destroy All Software[1] screencasts: do your hart jump everytime you see Gary orchestrate Vim with elegance? Are you eager to start molding your ruby/python code with his mastery? If the answers is yes, then just let yourself go and start learning: define an easy project and just try to build it up from scratch (watchign screencasts, reading tutorials along the way).

If the answer is no and all you want is to start a tech business, then perhaps it is better for you to hire/find a team?

Btw, if you want to discuss programming, bouncing ideas off and just general support chat, fire me an email (in my profile).

Good luck! :)

[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Hey, thanks for the support. I admit I don't know enough about what was going on in that vid to make it exciting, but the thought of being able to make a website do whatever I want to sounds incredibly fulfilling.

klaut 13 years ago | | |

then just try make it do ;)

Does not have to be something big. Perhaps just playing tic-tac-toe with your web app can be a start. or not even that. You don;t have to build a web app from the beginning. Try building a simple console app first. It's much easier.

klaut 13 years ago | | |

you can start with Ruby Koans: http://rubykoans.com

filvdg 13 years ago |

If i was in your situation i would move to silicon valley, visit coding events and finds bright coders and offer them your time , not your cash to help them to get traction , you will develop plenty of other skills you will need to succeed and you might find an activity you really enjoy that is not coding

chamboo 13 years ago | |

I hear this often. Is this really a good idea? I have thought of it, but I wonder, am I just going to move all the way out there, and then I still won't find anything? What then. I guess I could just sit here and do nothing too, I guess that would be similarly effective. I would like to think that what you suggest is true. I hope that it is. I don't know why I have so many doubts without even actually attempting it. Maybe a visit out there would be a good idea to break this way of thinking.

rdouble 13 years ago | | |

If you have a million dollars and have not done anything for 276 days, why wouldn't you just try it out?

segmondy 13 years ago |

Ha, we have the opposite problem, we have experience programming, delusions of being elite programmers, we have great ideas or so we think. Got debt, house, cars, bills, and no cash. Trade you idea for idea. How did you earn your cash? Teach me, and I can teach you how to code.

cjbenedikt 13 years ago |

I wish I had your problem ;-)Where r u based? You don't need to learn how to code, there are excellent devs out there, find your mission/passion and spend some of your cash on it. One area could be mobile tech for develop. countries - exciting! Best of luck

chamboo 13 years ago | |

Hey, I am currently in Dallas. I really have no ties here, I am considering picking up and moving, but not sure yet. I would definitely like to know some people who have worked on, or are working on something programming related. Part of the reason for me wanting to learn basic coding is to find my mission/passion. I have many interests, most too large probably to be feasible on any level, but I feel that as I become more aware of things that are missing in my life, more ideas pop into my head. I would like to be a little more prepared than I currently am in case the need arises, to put it coarsely.

cjbenedikt 13 years ago | | |

Hmmm, I'm beginning to think that maybe you should formulate WHAT you want to do before you get to the HOW. Maybe it'll turn out coding may only be a small part of it. Building a start-up goes way beyond coding. Jeff Bezos never coded yet look at where Amazon is today...Just a thought

aliston 13 years ago |

Out of curiosity, how have you managed to save 1mm by age 30?

tectonic 13 years ago |

I am involved with, and have started, a number of companies. Feel free to send me a email if you want to chat. Contact info in my profile.