Hi everyone,

a friend and I are currently in the progress of developing an app. We are psychology grads and are currently looking for capable app developers / software engineers to help us in dev. since our competence is very limited in this respective field.

I‘ve got two main questions:

  1. How / where do we best look for help? Since we do not yet have investors on board we are not able to pay a salary. We are therefore looking to onboard app devs on a SitC (shares in the company) type of deal. Where do we best look for people that are wiling to hop onto a start up and work for 0 payment in the beginning.

  2. How do we make sure that the people we approach do not run off with what we pitch them? Are NDAs enough? Couldn‘t they just tell a friend and nobody can track whether they said anything or not? I do not get IP at all and don‘t understand how we can actually protect the idea in the very early stages of recruiting.

Thanks a lot!

  • ttbn1@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    As a dev myself, you’d need to give them a considerable amount of equity for them to take it seriously tbh, to the point they’d be co-founders. If your launching a tech platform and your non-technical, your likely major start-up cost is going to be engineering. Asking a dev to build it for you without paying them is essentially asking them to take on the risk of your project - if it doesn’t work, you just lose time, whereas they lose weeks / months of labour hours.

    Either pitch your idea to someone technical to get a CTO, or try and raise investment. A good app / platform will likely cost 5-20k to make, if not a lot more - no serious developer would do that unless they felt they were being compensated properly.