We were excited to see the response to the CodeLesson “Be Your Own Technical Co-Founder” Series, which we launched yesterday. I wanted to provide a little more background on how this works and our motivation for doing it.
Our cofounder initiative was inspired from discussions we’ve been seeing on startup blogs and message boards: it’s the chicken/egg dilemma of a person with a great idea for a technology business without the skills to implement even a working prototype of the idea. Even if you’re not doing a startup, there’s value for any business owner or manager to have a working understanding of technology as a way to communicate better with their technical staff.
We realized that in many cases, entrepreneurs could spend 12 weeks searching in vain for someone who would help them with their startup, or they could spent 12 weeks learning HTML, PHP (or Ruby), and MySQL from us, and put together at least something functional.
When we ran the first session of our PHP course last year and discovered there were not one but two startup CEOs in the course, we knew there was something there. As our course catalog has grown to more than forty courses, we wanted to make sure that the number of courses in our catalog wasn’t going to get too confusing. So we plucked out eight of our most popular courses — while still giving students a choice between two terrific back-end technologies, PHP and Ruby — and put them in one place to make the whole process relatively foolproof.
Judging from the response we saw when we announced the series yesterday, it seems like it would make sense to do more of these. What kinds of course series would you like to see on CodeLesson? Let us know in the comments.
4 Comments
I am looking for a technical co-founder right now. I can tell you that there is nothing on the web of any substance that caters to this kind of relationship. It would make sense to me that a company would promote a co-founding business model on some part of their business. Their is a disconnect between technical and non technical concepts. If someone would create a company called technical co-founder.com they would be able to weed through good and bad concepts and do quit well. This company technicalcofounder.com would recruit thousands of other technical people to spend some of their time on each project. Its ok to have 5,6,7,8,9 things going on at one time.
Andrew John Matthews
I just bought all names associated with doing just that. I will also look for a technicalco-founder.com to create this site.
Andrew John Matthews
Try out PartnerUp.com to find co-founders also BuildItWith.Me
But really referrals from people you know is much more likely to produce something.
I created ServerCyde.com to let people build DB backed prototypes of sites using zero server side code. It’s all done in Javascript which greatly reduces the barriers to entry since the entire development environment is already on any ones computer that has a browser and notepad.
We are going to be starting a program where we look at your idea and quote you what it would cost to build a demo, or prototype, using outsourced resources, which we would manage for you. (in the range of $500 to $1000).
If you have even the meagerest of JS skills, you could really benefit from signing up and trying to build it yourself!