Question on executive summary idea I have | Hacker News Reader

Question on executive summary idea I have

3 pointsAllocator20085 comments

What if somebody who had a few years dev experience, came up with a cool executive summary for a business-to-business, site-subscription kind of business model targeted towards software companies, but didn't really know anyone who were developers in his social circles to kind of coordinate it with? For example I notice the "contest" offered here to fund startups is largely geared to at least two-person teams. Where could one find like a good portal/jboss/xml/xsl/database developer to work with in perhaps getting what one feels is already a good executive summary up for action and perhaps even join in the funding contest, since one isn't likely to want to do it by oneself, even if oneself did have some jboss experience? I am pretty sure "I have a winner", just unfortunately most of my friends are starving artist types rather than starving hacker types, lol. Any info much appreciated.

- "Allocator2008", a unit test/test automation developer in Austin

you might have better luck finding hackers if you dropped the jboss,portal,XML bits.

Having a 2 person team is good. But if you're working with the right tools you can probably throw together a prototype yourself. Then you can use that to better illustrate to fellow hackers what your idea is about. I for one am not a big fan if reading executive summaries. But I'm willing to work on something with someone I know is also a good hacker. Being able to see the prototype of an idea for example would show me if I would enjoy working with someone.

A developer can really get screwed jumping into someone else's idea on faith. If you really believe in your idea then pay to outsource a prototype, then (since you are not a developer) show you have the business chops to bring it all together. Once you do, developers for your idea will be a dime a dozen.

Oh cool, interesting, thanks. Say the idea entailed having a portal, which, in a first cut, would take uploaded xml files, parse them into business objects, process these into some other form, and output them into say, excel? So, input xml --> parse --> compute --> output excel to the user. Could I pay like some India company to whip up a prototype portal for this on the cheap? Like in the range of 1 or 2 K ? Thanks much.

ha, good luck with that. you will really need it.

I don't know the cost... but I do know that parsing xml and outputting excel is not all that sophisticated. However you'll need a more concrete application of the process to get some bytes built. Hit craigslist software developers up for some quotes to get a better idea of what you need to move forward (dont hire anyone yet!). And start reading: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/11/09/rexml-processing-xml-in-...

Good luck.

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