As a recovering Marketing / Biz Dev guy currently considering taking the plunge and starting a company, I find myself seriously lacking with regards to engineer contacts. I'm in the NYC area (yes, I'm going to try to hit the meet) and I know there are plenty of great minds here; I just don't know them.
In brainstorming ways that I might remedy this situation, I had a thought. Many startups whose sites I pass by seem to have a common issue - Copy. For a number of reasons, an invaluable sentiment escapes many companies large and small: You can build and launch the greatest product in the world but if you can't tell people about it, it’s all for naught. Companies big and small have this issue - typos, grammatical errors, inefficient structure, verbosity, and so on.
In my eyes, the big guys have no excuse. For small and emerging companies however, money is a huge factor. Hiring a wordsmith is the obviously the last thing on your mind when deciding whether to spend a few hundred dollars on XYZ... Or eat. At the same time, poor copy puts you at a serious disadvantage in your market.
No, I’m not offering to write copy for entire websites free of charge. What I am considering is to take a look at your homepage, marketing sheet, mass email, elevator pitch, or whatever other single item you need the most help on, and refine / polish it. This will be the start of an infinitely more professional image and may even help put some minds at ease just a bit so that focus can be where it should be: On the product. The clear benefit to me will be working with intelligent and technical people immersed in interesting projects, all while expanding my contact list. No I’m not going to pitch people who approach me on my idea, but perhaps you have a talented friend currently looking for the right founding opportunity to potentially break him/her out of a corporate rut. That might be something we discuss while refining that document you’d like me to look at...
So is this something people here on HN might find appealing? This is an issue that I’ve seen mentioned numerous times here and as such, I’m posing a potential solution that may benefit everyone involved. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.
I've always wondered if we can just pool the talent available here, with people advertising what they're good at. For those that aren't deeply involved in their own start ups, this can almost be fun. If someone has a good idea of something they want to hack up, just try to pull a few people from this ether of talent, and try to build something very quickly. I'm talking about maximum of a few days of highly-parallel work.
If it grows into something above an assignment, there's your tiny start up. If not much comes out of it, the experience of being part of a small team working on something together can be worth much more than the time spent on it. Creating worth that is more than the sum of its parts.
And this post highlights that it's not just hackers/coders that can contribute. Illustrators, d esigners, copywriters, law students, etc. There is very little limit because of little hierarchy.