We had been looking for developers since day one, but with the change of focus from “the whole shabang” to “simply a prototype” or version 1, our efforts intensified. We wanted to know soon whether this would be a viable project and, if not, move on to something else (or at least resume normal lives—you wouldn’t believe how much time it takes corresponding, reading, calculating, and chasing leads and resources for this app).
For this “version 1” app, we envisioned spending a couple thousand dollars for development in a 2-4 week time-frame. We knew the dollar amount was low for development. It was what we thought we could afford. I even considered figuring out how to do it myself, but gave that up very quickly after the introduction to the “how-to” video made my eyes cross. Our interest in an additional source of income was driving us to take a risk and make this app happen, but our fear of eroding the savings we both had spent years creating kept us feeling risk-averse. I imagine this is the conundrum that many potential entrepreneurs feel and, for many, stops them in their tracks. We may yet stop in our tracks, but we wanted to go a little further to see if we could make it work. So we picked a number we were mostly comfortable with, closed our eyes (maybe left one eye open), and stepped forward. It’s just a prototype, right? We were determined to get at least that accomplished.
Several people suggested we talk to local schools and maybe a student would want to develop our app as a project. This seemed like a great idea, but the reality wasn’t practical for us. We were concerned that our project would need to be modified to suit the scope and time-frame of the school, that the quality of the product could be “hit or miss” and that, once the official project was over, there was little to no follow-up available to fix bugs or add features. Also, I once had worked with a talented student on a very small technology project and, despite his good intentions, other school work and social life often took precedence over my deadlines so my “very small” project dragged on for over a year. And, in this case, the person had not yet developed organizational or communication skills as far as maintaining notes from our conversations or sending an invoice when he needed to be paid. This made for a messy and difficult process. I had not found this student through a local university so he was not doing this as an official school project with a supervisor. This meant I had no one to go to when I had a problem with him. If you find yourself considering a student to do some software development for you, I highly recommend talking to an academic department to find someone who has a supervisor or a mentor so that the student has someone to guide him or her through difficult tasks and act as an intermediary if you—or the student—have problems in your relationship.
With the student idea crossed off of our list, my husband and I continued our search for experienced developers that might charge less than $100 per hour. We didn’t have much luck finding people at lower rates who knew how to develop for the iPhone and most that we did find were not local—we got nervous about working with (and paying) strangers. That said, I was feeling so desperate to find someone that I once gave my phone number to two guys at the airport who were reading a book about developing for the iPhone (never heard from them).
Our big break came when a trusted colleague from work knew someone who had been developing iPhone applications as part of his job within a university and this guy was looking for side work to help support his family. I spoke to him by phone—he sounded excited and had ideas for how to use existing game engines and ways to simplify my idea for a “prototype”—and he charged under $100 per hour.
We met in person for about an hour and the developer guy—let’s call him Johnny—estimated that he could do a simplified “version 1” of our app in 40-50 hours, including the artwork, animation, and some physics. Woo hoo! He gave us a time and dollar amount range within which he could complete the project and felt confident he could do it at the lower end of the range. This was all so reasonable and easy! It was a *little* more than we had hoped to spend, so my husband—I think I ought to give him a name here too…how about “Lyle”—and I crunched the numbers, scrunched up our faces, and took a leap.
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