Hello fastlaners, random 25 year old here.
This might look like a progress thread but it's not, I promise.
Last October my friend had (in our view) a great app idea. I talked about it with some more friends and they all agreed. Of course the idea is worth millions (yeah I wish lol) so I can't tell explicitly what it is but it doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion.
The point was that none of us knew how to code and none of us had any business experience, some only had a small job experience in unrelated fields. We also had very little money to invest.
Nevertheless, I decided to get started anyway and began looking for developers.
I hired the only ones that I could afford, Nigerian guys my age for €2000. We agreed on milestone payments and got the project started in November, I've only paid about one third of the money so far. I would be the one using his own money and my friends were mostly unwilling to risk anything. As the devs worked, I began looking into legal stuff such as how to set up a company in my country, how to deal with taxes and how to get funds. I would also have to deal with privacy policies and with setting up a well done ad campaign.
Now I'm in the desert of desertion. The app is being made and I feel mostly useless until it's done.
My biggest problem here is that I have no technical know-how. I feel like I'm good at managing a company but I have no proof of it yet (none that I can show others anyway, I'm very convinced of it myself if that counts for something lol), I just know that I love diving into data and analyzing the way the market responds to develop new strategies and stuff like that.
Given that I don't know how to code, I have to outsource and anybody can steal my project.
I actually do know how to advertise on social media and how the metrics work but I'm not a graphic designer so I need to outsource that too. I also believe that there should be other people taking care of the ad campaigns full time because I should focus on finding new sponsors, planning future investments, handling legal stuff etc.
And finally the last problem is this one: I need investors but anybody I tell my idea to can simply steal it and use the money to develop it themselves by cutting out a useless person (me) who would otherwise own 51% of the company. Given my need for them, the only thing that I can do here is take the risk.
So I'm not asking what to do here because I've already decided that I'm going for it all the way.
I would, however, like to ask if I should rightfully be worried about this, what I can do to fix these issues, if what I've said sounds sensible and if it's reasonable to do what I'm doing given my little experience (just curious on this one because I'm doing it anyway lol).
I know that I'm going to fail, learn, try again, fail, learn, try again and succeed.
I'm just very scared because I would be using someone else's money and if things don't go well it's going to be harder to get more in the future; although I can answer my own doubt here and say that if I don't try it's always going to be hard to succeed.
Last but not least, I basically have no team with know-how and (most likely) no money to hire them.
Combine all of these things together and you get a very scared entrepreneur who really looks like a fool that's just rushing headlong into something he doesn't understand.
Please help lol.
This might look like a progress thread but it's not, I promise.
Last October my friend had (in our view) a great app idea. I talked about it with some more friends and they all agreed. Of course the idea is worth millions (yeah I wish lol) so I can't tell explicitly what it is but it doesn't matter for the sake of this discussion.
The point was that none of us knew how to code and none of us had any business experience, some only had a small job experience in unrelated fields. We also had very little money to invest.
Nevertheless, I decided to get started anyway and began looking for developers.
I hired the only ones that I could afford, Nigerian guys my age for €2000. We agreed on milestone payments and got the project started in November, I've only paid about one third of the money so far. I would be the one using his own money and my friends were mostly unwilling to risk anything. As the devs worked, I began looking into legal stuff such as how to set up a company in my country, how to deal with taxes and how to get funds. I would also have to deal with privacy policies and with setting up a well done ad campaign.
Now I'm in the desert of desertion. The app is being made and I feel mostly useless until it's done.
My biggest problem here is that I have no technical know-how. I feel like I'm good at managing a company but I have no proof of it yet (none that I can show others anyway, I'm very convinced of it myself if that counts for something lol), I just know that I love diving into data and analyzing the way the market responds to develop new strategies and stuff like that.
Given that I don't know how to code, I have to outsource and anybody can steal my project.
I actually do know how to advertise on social media and how the metrics work but I'm not a graphic designer so I need to outsource that too. I also believe that there should be other people taking care of the ad campaigns full time because I should focus on finding new sponsors, planning future investments, handling legal stuff etc.
And finally the last problem is this one: I need investors but anybody I tell my idea to can simply steal it and use the money to develop it themselves by cutting out a useless person (me) who would otherwise own 51% of the company. Given my need for them, the only thing that I can do here is take the risk.
So I'm not asking what to do here because I've already decided that I'm going for it all the way.
I would, however, like to ask if I should rightfully be worried about this, what I can do to fix these issues, if what I've said sounds sensible and if it's reasonable to do what I'm doing given my little experience (just curious on this one because I'm doing it anyway lol).
I know that I'm going to fail, learn, try again, fail, learn, try again and succeed.
I'm just very scared because I would be using someone else's money and if things don't go well it's going to be harder to get more in the future; although I can answer my own doubt here and say that if I don't try it's always going to be hard to succeed.
Last but not least, I basically have no team with know-how and (most likely) no money to hire them.
Combine all of these things together and you get a very scared entrepreneur who really looks like a fool that's just rushing headlong into something he doesn't understand.
Please help lol.
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