—John F. Kennedy, September 1962
Are you looking for a technical co-founder for your game changer idea?
If you are, you are not alone. Only in my first weeks of living at New york I have been reached by more than ten entrepreneurs wanting me as their technical co-counder.
For all those request I have said no. There are many reasons why I said no. You should know these reasons and understand them before you try to approach your next potential technical co-founder.
This post shows you very good reasons. Even though this could sounds excessive, it certainly touch very good points. From that, I want to highlight the following reasons why I won’t be your tech co-founder:
-“Startups are like babies, you don’t do it with someone you just met”
-“Your are easily replaceable” unless your network is great: “As a business guy in a startup, I expect you to have Barack Obama as a 2nd level Linkedin connection and Zuckys number on speed dial … if you don’t, probably I don’t need you”
-“I am not passionate about your subject” In my case I am all-in entrepreneur for social and financial (transactional) solutions.
So as you can see, it is going to be quite hard to find your technical lover (because that is what co-founders became, just like a marriage). Chances are nobody wants to be your tech co-founder, so what can you do: quit, cry, pray? If you are really passionate about making your startup a reality, you should go all-in, get out the building and start validating your business hypothesis using methodologies like Lean Startup. If you don’t know how to apply the Lean model to your idea, consider joining a workshop with Lean Startup Machine .
Once your ready to validate, use tools like landing pages, build simple web sites, create newsletters, or build a basic working prototype. Ok, you don’t know how to do all that. Well you will have to learn it! How? There is something called Internet and Google that will show you options to build what you need to validate you assumptions.
I am offering advice on building minimum viable products here, in case you need help. If you don’t like me, ask somebody else or teach yourself.
Trust me on this: once you have validated your idea (traction, users, revenue, etc), you will have a 100x better pitch to find your dreamt technical co-founder.
I hope this post help you on moving forward and follow your dreams!
Comments/feedback @jefreybulla or at HN
After all the drama and media attention around the “creepy app” Girls Around Me, what I first wanted to do was obvious: use the app. However it was too late, the app has been banned and it is not discoverable in the App Store. That’s why I am bringing you alternatives to find girls around you in the way the “creepy app” would do.
Banjo
A social discovery app to see people around you. It doesn’t let you filter by genre, so you will see man and women. I had the feeling that the app gives you 50% for each genre. You can find girls around you, see where they are in a map, see their profile picture, their twitter feed, and actually you can send them a twitter message within the app. It has a feature to see a grid with only people profile pictures. It is a very cool app.
Sonar
A similar app. Sonar will show you girls around you (again, no genre filter), it will let you see the last geotag update with a map snapshot. From within the app you can see girls twitter feed as well as send a tweet them. What makes difference Sonar from Banjo is that Sonar apply a interest-based filter to show you people that is closer to you. You can see who you follow that this person also follows. I found this approach really interesting.
Although these apps are really cool and help you find girls around you, I am not going to use them for that purpose. There are other situations when these apps can be really useful. My motivation was to evidence that even if Girls Around Me got banned, it doesn’t mean your public information is going to stop being public. So adjust your privacy settings in all social services as you prefer, understanding the consequences.
Update: Girls Around Me developer has said that they removed the app from the App Store. Interestingly the developer mentioned Banjo and Sonar and how they do the same thing and haven’t been banned/attacked.
I hope this is useful information for those of you eager and ready to meet girls around you or for those of you that enjoy or hate all the drama around location services and privacy.
If you use other alternatives to find girls around you, let me know to complement the list.
Comments are always welcome @jefreybulla
As a fan of the test fast and pivot fast strategy, I decided to pivot my startup experiment after a week of failed efforts to get users.
The facts
After moving to New York last February, one of my first goals in this new life stage was to learn to use a new programming language. I chose Django as my tool and thought that the best way to learn Django was by building a startup experiment. I came up with an idea of a web app to share knowledge to help people learning new stuff. After spending one week coding the app, I got a rough prototype that I started showing to people at every event and at every opportunity I had.
One after another, people were not interested in the idea. They didn’t see any value in it. In one week, I pitched to more than 30 people, wrote follow up emails and did what I could to sell it. As the result of my efforts, I only got one person kind of interested. And this one person helped me because she is an entrepreneur and a good person and she would help me no matter what the idea was.
The idea was so bad that I didn’t get any feedback from friends. I think it was so bad that they could’t say anything constructive about it. I got to believe that there was no good story in that idea, so people were never going get excited about it.
However, I rapidly realized my idea sucked. That’s why I pivoted the idea to do something with a story, hopefully a good story. This time, instead of coding first, I’m using Launchrock to sell my idea. If it gets enough attention, I will start coding; if I doesn’t, I will keep testing other startup ideas.
Something exciting about these days is how easy and cheap it is to test ideas. My first experiment cost me less than $20 and two weeks of work: one week coding (Python/Django/Heroku), one week selling. Hopefully, if you iterate and test enough you will hit a good idea and possibly build a business around it.
If you are wondering what I am working on, it is called Ututo.me and you can check it out here .
Comments or feedback are welcome: @jefreybulla
Hi everybody, today I want to share some hack challenges I worked on at the Hacker Olympics*, an event that took place last weekend in New York City.
Why you should read this? Because you are hacker and want to see if you are able to solve the hack challenges. Or because you are curious about what hackers do on weekends. Or maybe you are in charge of hiring hackers and to see how you can test people in interviews.
If you are trying to solve the challenge and test yourself, only read what it is within the dashed lines (the challenge), then try to compare to how I did it.
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Challenge Wheel of Doom - Time to solve it: 10 minutes.
Write a script that, every 45 minutes, select a number between 1 and X, makes a sound and display the number.
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How did I solve it? I used JavaScript that uses the SetInterval() method to generate the time span. Then I made a function to generate a random number using the Math.random() method. And the sound? To generate the sound, I embedded a beep sound in the document and used Play() to make a noise.
Can you see the code? Sure, download in zip or git from github
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Challenge StarWars.CSS - Time to solve it: 10 minutes
For a given text, replicate the opening to Star wars.
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10 minutes!! f!*#!! this is going to be hard.
I couldn’t finished on time, but a guy next to me did it, and this is how he solved it (I don’t really know his name, sorry): Take a text in a <div> and transform it using webkit transformations to build the perspective effect and then animate to make the <div> move up. It’s not a perfect StarWars effect but it’s a valid hack for a 10 minute challenge, don’t you think?
I didn’t see his code, but trying to apply the idea, I used “perspective” and “rotate” webkit properties. Once perspective is there, the next step is to animate the <div> to move it up. For the animation, I used JQuery animate() method to change the top property of the <div> within a time span.
The code is here: git or zip
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Challenge Fibonacci Sums and Daughters - Time to solve it : 5 min
Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89… By considering the terms i the Fibonacci sequence whose values do not exceed four four million, find the sum of the even-valued terms.
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No JavaScript for this one! We need more power. That’s why I solved it with a simple python script: a “while” loop would create the Fibonacci series for numbers less than four million. Within the while, I filtered even-value terms so I could make the sum.
Code for the Fibonacci even-value sum here.
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Challenge Ned, I am a Maiden - Time to solve it : 10min
A palindromic number reads the same both ways. The largest palindrome made from the product of two 2-digit numbers is 9009 = 91 x 99. Fin the largets palindrome made from the product o two 3-digit numbers.
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My teammate @raycohen solved this one in less than 10 minutes, awesome!. It took me more time but better later than never, right? Let’s see what we need to do
1. Make a product of two 3-digit numbers x, y.
2. Find out if the product is palindrome or not.
3. If it’s palindrome and it is the largets one, store it as the largest, for all other cases go to step 1 to test with a different combination of numbers x, y.
You have to do this loop until you test all the combinations of two 3-digit numbers x,y.
It sounds easy right? Well, if you never faced this problem before, it’s not. The challenge for me was to find an easy way to discover whether a number is palindrome or not.
After chew it up for some minutes and propose a couple of solutions I came up with a good one:
Reverse the number and compare it with itself. So if you have 1234, then you reverse it to 4321. After that you do 1234 ==4321 getting a False statement. On the other hand when you do the same procedure to 4004 you will get TRUE a statement.
Once you solve that you are pretty much done. If you want to check the code, it is here, written in Python.
And of course, let me give you the answer: the largets palindrome made from the product o two 3-digit numbers is 906609 !
I hope you enjoy the challenges as I did. If you have your own challenges, share them please.
I’m Jefrey, a dream developer and entrepreneur.
Lot of times I have been asked why I am an entrepreneur and most of those times I don’t have a good answer, basically because of the amount of difficulties an entrepreneur has to face. Trying to answer that question, today, I want to write some false myths about entrepreneurship (so those are not reasons why I am an entrepreneur) and the reasons why I have been an entrepreneur for more than four years. Although my intention is not to write a guide, these facts could help you decide whether or not to become an entrepreneur.
Myths about entrepreneurship – Bad reasons to become an entrepreneur
· You are the boss— false, everybody else is your boss; even worse is that you have multiple bosses: investors, customers, advisors, etc.
· Being an entrepreneur can help you manage your time— false, you will have to work at least 14 hours a day and maybe make no money.
· Being an entrepreneur is cool— false, it’s only cool until you have to pay employees and providers and your credit card bill is due. Don’t do it because it is “cool,” do it because you believe in it.
· Everybody can be an entrepreneur — false. Entrepreneurs need a special personality to overcome great difficulties. They will need tolerance for failure, flexible thinking, passion and more.
After reading this, you might be saying, “there is no reason to become an entrepreneur.” Several people have told me as much. However, these are my reasons why I keep doing this:
- I like big challenges: I want to get where few can get
- I like difficulties: they make me think seriously and test myself
- I like risk: it is adventure for me
- I like to dream: it keeps me alive
- I like to help others: I feel great when I create jobs and solutions for people
- I am passionate about entrepreneurship: I really, really enjoy it.
As you can see, my reasons come more from personal likes than external factors like money or connections. Even though I understand there are all kinds of entrepreneurs, I truly believe that being an entrepreneur is a matter of personality rather than money or skills.
There you have it! If you have thoughts about why you are an entrepreneur or want to make a comment please write. I will be writing more post about entrepreneurship, the tech world, business, investment and related topics.
Before closing, I would like to announce an exciting change in my life. After 26 years living in my home country of Colombia, I am following my heart and moving to New York city. Inspired by love and my own dreams, I am sure a lot of adventures are ahead of me. I am looking forward to getting involved in the startup scene in the Big Apple.
@jefreybulla
Two days after the genius has passed away, I want to dedicate my first post on Tumblr to Steve Jobs, writing what I learned about his story and extracting lessons I believe other entrepreneurs around the globe should take into account.
Even though I am a young entrepreneur (26 years old), \it’s been an honor to live part of Steve’s age. I feel he showed us an invaluable lesson about entrepreneurship and life, some of which I would like to summarize below:
1. Think different: he did this by not following crowds, which allowed him to make/create unique products.
2. Believe in your instinct: Steve Jobs envisioned and executed by trusting his heart.
3. Be patient: Think in the long-term, envision something big and great.
4. Perfect design: he created unique experiences in everything he built. As he stated, “you need to chew it up” and “most people don’t take the time to do it.”.
5. “Love what you do”: being an entrepreneur is complicated; do it only if you are passionate about it, it’s the only way.
These were just 5 entrepreneurship lessons learned from Steve Jobs, let me know yours!
