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App-idea but 0 skills

Idea threads

Tommey

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Hey,

I have an idea in my mind for an app for a while now. I neglect it, since I have no coding experience whatsoever. But I keep coming back to it in my mind, because I think it could be successful.
If I really want to execute this idea, I see my best option in hiring a developper.

My question is:
How would I do this, without taking the risk that this person would just steal my idea?
I know it seems to be step 32 before step 1, but if I actually believe it could be a good idea, I'd need to protect it, right?

Also, does anyone here have experience about this and could it be estimated how much money it potentially could cost?
 
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Hadrian

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Hey,

I have an idea in my mind for an app for a while now. I neglect it, since I have no coding experience whatsoever. But I keep coming back to it in my mind, because I think it could be successful.
If I really want to execute this idea, I see my best option in hiring a developper.

My question is:
How would I do this, without taking the risk that this person would just steal my idea?
I know it seems to be step 32 before step 1, but if I actually believe it could be a good idea, I'd need to protect it, right?

Also, does anyone here have experience about this and could it be estimated how much money it potentially could cost?
Try this thread:
 

RepoJoy

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Hi mate, I own a software development company.
We think, design and build products, and many times people come up with the same problem.
- How can I protect my idea?

Well, basically, you should not.
An idea is basically worthless if it's not executed. Also, the first step to knowing if your idea is a good one is to validate it which basically means sharing it with every person you can and ask for feedback.

I'm exactly in the same process on my own, I've created a landing page in order to tell what my idea is about and ask for feedback before building it (repojoy.com)

Anyways, if anytime you need advisory with the process or the development just sent me a message, we are from Argentina which makes us really cheap! fjhombre@gmail.com its my personal email adress!

cheers!
 

seanjohn

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First of all -- I don't care what your idea is, it's not original. So the idea that someone 'will steal it' is ridiculous. It's all about execution.

Secondly, DO NOT HIRE A DEVELOPER.
Trust me, I've been there. Over the last few years I've spent $40,000 on developers for various projects and most turn out crap or don't even deliver at all. It's because of two things: poor planning and unrealistic expectations.

Finally, if you truly have no programming skills (and even if you do), the best thing to do is to make a mockup or a prototype of your app so you can get instant feedback from potential customers and future partners/developers.


Learn how to use Figma. It's really simple, you can learn all the basics within a couple hours. Start making a demo of your app, and link each button to the corresponding screen. Make it usable. Get feedback from friends, family, strangers, enemies, wherever. See how they interact with it.

What's the response? Is it: "oh that's nice?" or is it "WOW, I need this NOW!"

If it's not the latter, congratulations! STOP! You needn't go any further, you've just saved yourself years of time, headaches and money.

If you are getting people saying "yes, I want this now!", then get more feedback, implement these changes in the mockup, and then (and ONLY then) should you approach a developer. By then you'll have a clear vision and expectation of how the app should work. This tip alone will save you thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars.

Ignore this advice at your peril. I've been through it all. Life's too short to make mediocre products that no one wants.
 
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Jeix

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Hello, I've actually been in your spot a few years ago.

I wanted to make an app but had 0 skills. I decided to make it anyway. I hired a cheap developer from a developing country (I did it through discord, which was super dangerous and luckily I wasn't scammed, I'd recommend using upwork) and started doing it.
The truth of the matter is that it was 2018, I was 24 and hadn't yet figured out what I wanted to do exactly. The app for me was just the first idea I jumped on because I didn't have anything else going on but I was fascinated by the idea of fastlane.

Fast forward to today, I am now self employed with a job that pays increasingly more that I've grown over these years. In the meantime, I've also grown as a person and figured out the app wasn't really something I wanted, so it ended up being a waste of money.
FYI, the app is still not finished and it probably never will be. The good news is that I didn't bet my life on it, so I can safely move on.
How does this help you? Here's some things I've learned:

- Know what you want. Do you want an app or is it just your way of saying "I know I wanna go fastlane but I have no idea what I'm doing and an app has a small chance of being wildly successful, allowing me to go fastlane"? For me, it took me years to realize it was actually the latter. The real fastlane business I'm looking to build now has to do with board games and card games, something I've been cultivating my whole life and that I've been messing with without never really taking that next step for far too long. Now that I spent the past few years stabilizing my financial situation, I can afford to dabble in something I truly know and understand. More on this point later but in general, don't do something just because you're fascinated by the fastlane. Do it because you know what you're doing. It's okay to not know 100% of it because you will naturally learn more as you do it, but you should still have a good grasp of the industry and market you'll be tackling. Often, this means having been a long time consumer in it.
- If you do go for it, build it in a sustainable way. What does this mean? It means that if you earn X every month, your app should cost you half of X every month. If you need to borrow money to develop it, I would be careful because that's likely a risk you can't afford. When I was building my app I did have the chance to borrow money and my dad even offered to support me with some of his savings. I refused, and it turned out to be the right decision. The app was built sustainably and I was able to save money at all times while building it. Now that my income has grown as a result of my side efforts and I've realized I don't really want it, I can easily cut my losses and move on without it affecting my life in a major way. Sustainability is the opposite of Silicon valley mentality, the idea that you're supposed to borrow huge amounts of money and either succeed or die trying, living off of funding rounds until you're profitable. You only hear the success stories that come of this, never the failures, which vastly outnumber them.
- Nobody cares about your idea. I hate to break it to you, but I've learned this myself too. No matter how good your idea is, nobody cares because you're not the center of anyone's world. There's billions of us all with a bunch of new ideas every day. Why would a developer take on all the risks that come with being an entrepreneur and actually having to spend time and money to market the app when they can just do what they know and pocket safe money for their job? You're just another number to them, another client who believes their app will change the world. They've seen hundreds like you and they know the best money there is is that which flows from your pocket into theirs, not the latest fad nobody will care about anymore in six months. Building and marketing an app are two separate things that both need to go well for it to succeed. Did you take into account marketing costs? You could have the best app in the world but you still need to sell it to your clients, and advertising costs money.
Stay sustainable. You'll need longer but you won't crash and burn.
Also, if anyone will ever try to copy your idea, they'll do it AFTER you've already done the hard work for them, meaning after you've already made money from it and proven to your competitors that there's actually a market for it, not when all you have is an uncertain idea they'll need to spend a bunch of money on just to test it out.
I'm familiar with gaming fads like battle royales and auto battlers, every company jumped on them as soon as they saw a successful game doing it. Nobody cared about them when they were just ideas because proving that ideas are worthwhile costs money and no competitor will ever risk that of their own. It makes more sense to let the competition do all the work for you and then copy their result and outmarket them. Dota autochess is dead because Riot stepped in and won with Teamfight Tactics. They did it because Dota autochess was successful. They gave zero Fs about the untested idea of an autobattler. You should be scared of competition if you're already doing well, because nobody will care about you otherwise.
- Do what you understand. Even if you gave me the best idea for an app that lets people create music from their phone, I wouldn't do anything with it because I don't know anything about music and I don't care to. I like card games. What do you like? The app I made cost me $20,000+ over 3 years (again, sustainable) and was about fashion. Freaking fashion when all I like wearing is the same stuff every day because I don't care about how I look and I think designer clothes are just overpriced cotton.
I had no idea what I was doing and I paid the price. Zuckerberg got rich with software right? Since then, I've learned that your chances of success are a lot higher when you know and understand what you're doing and you are the ideal consumer for your own product because you like it so much. That's the best way to make something that your target customer will truly resonate with and happily buy.

So to summarize what I've learned, I recommend you think it over a lot and see if this is something you truly know and understand. For example, as a long time card game player I am very familiar with wear and tear of plastic sleeves used to protect my cards. Such a business would make sense to me because I already know as a customer what I'm looking for and by extension I can understand or easily learn as a manufacturer what a winning product would look like.

I hope you were able to find something useful in my post. I don't claim to be an expert nor a fastlaner, but I do believe that the lessons I've learned in these years have helped me a lot and I'm doing a lot better since I learned them. They might (or might not) apply only to me, but I thought it was useful to share.
Have a good day!
 

AnasHarn

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Hey I'm approximately in the same situation, I have many ideas that I would love to build and try, in order to get feedback and see what is worth is and what is not.
So I decided to take Dev courses, full stack dev from Codecademy, i give myself one year to build ok-level skills, able to make MVPs, test ideas and go look for funding.
Is this a good path to take ?
 

seanjohn

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Hey I'm approximately in the same situation, I have many ideas that I would love to build and try, in order to get feedback and see what is worth is and what is not.
So I decided to take Dev courses, full stack dev from Codecademy, i give myself one year to build ok-level skills, able to make MVPs, test ideas and go look for funding.
Is this a good path to take ?
Depends. If you don't actually care about coding (like me) then focus more on the high level stuff (ie. software stacks and how they work together) and learn about making prototypes using Figma. I recommend learning more about marketing so that you can cheaply test the waters for your prototypes before having it developed.

I've taken CS50 through HarvardX and while it was fun, I know now that programming is not for me. I just don't like grinding it out when I could hire someone better to do it while I work on tasks that I excel at.

If you have some downtime and are genuinely interested in programming, then by all means, do it.
I recommend choosing courses that have you build mini-projects like The Odin Project. By the time you finish it, if you don't have your own product, you'll at least have a decent portfolio to land a software developer gig.
 
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AnasHarn

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Depends. If you don't actually care about coding (like me) then focus more on the high level stuff (ie. software stacks and how they work together) and learn about making prototypes using Figma. I recommend learning more about marketing so that you can cheaply test the waters for your prototypes before having it developed.

I've taken CS50 through HarvardX and while it was fun, I know now that programming is not for me. I just don't like grinding it out when I could hire someone better to do it while I work on tasks that I excel at.

If you have some downtime and are genuinely interested in programming, then by all means, do it.
I recommend choosing courses that have you build mini-projects like The Odin Project. By the time you finish it, if you don't have your own product, you'll at least have a decent portfolio to land a software developer gig.
Hey thanks for the feedback, well I have hesitated a lot between The Odin Project and CodeCademy, decided to go with both of them since they seem to cover different angles and will give me more in depth experience and project practice.

In fact I find my self really appreciating programing and getting the computer to do what I want thanks to code so I think working this is not a chore for me and I will be able to keep going.

But in the meantime, time is running by and the time cost principle forces me to work faster to achieve this primary goal that will open more doors and give me the ability to test CENTS projects.
 

SaasPassion

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Start building with a developer the most basic app imaginable. That way he will probably have no desire to steal the idea, and the app will already be on the air under your name. Then improve it over time.

Only if you see that the assumptions you made in the beggining about the app are correct, will you continue to develop more features in the app. If they are incorrect, try to think of what you need to change or improve. Then make assumptions again, measure them and think about whether the data shows that they are correct or not.

Do not invest a lot of money and time in something that is based on a lot of assumptions that you have not tested in empirical tools that are true.

Application development can range from $100 to $100 million. I suggest that you start at 100 and from there progress gradually and toward your 100 million.
 

srodrigo

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Also, does anyone here have experience about this and could it be estimated how much money it potentially could cost?
This might be useful How much does it cost to make an app? - App Cost Calculator. There are similar tools that give you an estimate in days (I can't find it now...), which you could use to apply a daily rate you think you could get somewhere. This is another link that has some average hourly rates too How much does it cost to make an app for your business in 2022.

My advise would be to either partner with a developer for a reasonable share (minimum 50%, since they'll be doing most of the initial work), or get yourself a coding course to not depend on a programmer.

Good luck.
 

Gregory Carson

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You can use a non-disclosure agreement with your developers. A non-disclosure agreement, or an “NDA,” is a contracted agreement between private parties that certain information will remain confidential. NDA’s status as contracted agreements means that they are enforceable by law. We recently posted an article titled Non-Disclosure Agreements that explains the basics and has three different kinds available to download as templates.
 

Jeix

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I've taken CS50 through HarvardX and while it was fun, I know now that programming is not for me. I just don't like grinding it out when I could hire someone better to do it while I work on tasks that I excel at.
I agree and can relate to this. I tried learning how to code too and, although I could see myself getting better and understanding how to do it, I simply didn't want to. I'd much rather focus on other stuff, like the design aspect or the structure of my project. If there's one thing I can recommend is that you find out who you are and what you want as soon as possible, then you'll be able to do what you want and delegate what you don't want to do.
Just curious, what application can someone get developed for 100 bucks?
Some developers on fiverr offer copy and paste casino mobile games as a packaged service for around that amount. Good luck making any money off of them though.
You can use a non-disclosure agreement with your developers. A non-disclosure agreement, or an “NDA,” is a contracted agreement between private parties that certain information will remain confidential. NDA’s status as contracted agreements means that they are enforceable by law. We recently posted an article titled Non-Disclosure Agreements that explains the basics and has three different kinds available to download as templates.
While theoretically possible, it's a huge bother and a needless expense for someone who's just trying to test the waters. Not to mention good luck finding out your developer has breached it and then enforcing it, especially if you're choosing a developer from a faraway developing country.
From personal experience, you're probably better off saving yourself the trouble. If it really comes down to it later, you'll be able to easily convince a judge you were the one doing it first thanks to all the proof of work you've accumulated online and on your computer.
 
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Andy Black

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