drelihan

Great to see things like this in my hometown. I wished I had been able to make it.

Are you taking Discrete Optimization in coursera ( https://class.coursera.org/optimization-001/class/index )?

Congrats on digging in and trying to learn coding for your MVP. That will go a long way to helping your recruit a co-founder.

+1 on orangethirty's "A weekly or monthly charge ends up being easier for both sides." Hourly wage isn't a great way to hire. For an MVP, focus development items in terms of days and ( at most ) weeks. Go to a developer and tell them what you are looking to do. Then, ask them what part of it can they implement in one day or one week. If you like what you hear, hire them for that time frame and see how they do. If they're terrible, you'll know quickly and won't be out a terrible amount of cash.

I'd be interested in chatting. I'll shoot you an email

I guess it depends on what you are raising the cash for and how much you need to raise. If it is mostly to give you and/or your team a living stipend while you develop the product full-time, there are a number of tech incubators you could choose from or you could try to raise a few months salary from angel investors like me.

If you are using the cash more to buy an asset or equipment ( e.g. a food truck ), then you could try pitching it to a bank. I don't think they would go for it, but at least they would have collateral. If you have a personal car, you could try offering that for collateral as well.

- Part-time consulting. If you are able to consult 20 hours a week, that should be enough cash to cover a modest cost of living and maybe some extra to invest in your start-up. A lot of companies start this way. They build specific products for their clients and eventually develop a product/service of their own. Check out 37Signals story on how Basecamp came along.

- If you are developing an enterprise-level tool, you could try to pre-sell it to a large firm first and have them pay an advance. This is tricky, but possible if you are building a certain type of product and have the right experience/connections.

- Build an MVP in your spare time and start charging for it. You may be able to skip the financing step altogether. Either way, you'll have more luck raising funds if you already have some, but maybe not enough to be profitable, paying customers.

- Personal Savings

Some riskier ways to get cash:

- Cash in a portion of your 401k ( you'll pay a 10% early withdrawal penalty + taxes )

- Home Equity Line if you have enough equity in your home. Careful with this because you are gambling your home. Make sure that if the start-up fails, you'd be able to get a job making enough cash to cover the additional debt service on the equity line.

- Personal line of credit. You pay high interest rates and won't be able to borrow that much ( ~25k or so ). You've probably gotten offers like this in the mail before. Your credit card company sends you a blank check and says 6 months no interest loan. Same as above, if the startup doesn't make it, make sure you'll be able to handle the additional finance charge ( which will be crazy high ). Please don't do this one.

Just one point: the 50/50 split can just be a starting point for profit sharing. Companies can be structured for that decisions/voting are handled independently from ownership percentages. 50/50 splits aren't forever either. Additional equity can be issued at certain milestones. There are a lot of ways something like this can be setup so its fair for everyone and it seems like hmexx is open to suggestions to make that fair.

Web Apps aren't allowed on Kickstarter per their guidelines http://www.kickstarter.com/help/guidelines

"As in all categories, Kickstarter is for projects that can be completed, not things that require maintenance to exist. This means no e-commerce sites, web businesses, or social networking sites. (Yes, this means Kickstarter wouldn’t be allowed on Kickstarter. Funny, but true.)"

What about having a generic "Third Party Login" button drop down? On a click, a drop down appears with the different login options. This makes the options available to users, but lets the main brand shine.

to offer insurance, you have to be able to pay out if a claim is made. Since the insurance you are offering is all or none ( i.e. if social security goes away, it goes away for everyone ), you would have to pay out claims to everyone at once. This is much different than auto insurance where you only expect some small percentage of policy holders to put in a claim.

You need to find someone to take the other end of the bet. So, who would want to insure themselves in the case where social security stays around? Can you find enough of these people to balance out your risk?