evac's comments

It might depend on the gap between you and the others on the team. If the gap is small enough that they can keep up most of the time, learn with/from you and, most importantly, listen to you seriously when you give suggestions or point out problems, then it could probably work out. If the gap is big enough that they don't recognize good suggestions or important concerns from you when you bring it up, definitely stay away.

The above suggestion is partly based on my personal experience of working with a team where the two main leaders weren't the smartest in what they were trying to do (building the organizational structure of a growing business), which happened to be my forte since it's what I love to understand and study. As time went by, there were increasing problems with getting sales and building the business, which I felt were directly related with how we structured how people worked together.

I raised and pinpointed several issues more than a few times, and even had a two-hour face-to-face session where I had the chance to strongly emphasize the importance of the problems and had outlined steps to solving them. While they would listen to me out of consideration, they had their own assumptions about how the issues should be addressed and none of my suggestions were implemented. I eventually left in about a month, and most of the consequences I predicted came true so that they're having a much harder time than they need to.

True, interesting coincidences! Since I just recently joined HN, I haven't had much opportunity to bump into non-programmers (and programmers) who are also interested in psychology. Though this is a bit off-topic, I'm glad that posting the article (The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People) could bring around all sorts of people. Nice to meet you!

If we're talking about habit of highly successful people, I would agree it's persistence. But if we're talking specifically about highly creative and innovative people, then we may have to measure them with a slightly different set of metrics, for which solitude may be a more relevant habit than persistence.

Though I can't say whether solitude is THE number one habit, I would agree it's one of the best habits to have for generating insights and ideas.

I'm taking up self-teaching by choice and habit because I often like to learn things on my own at first. (Half of my "education" from middle school to current college studies have all been self-taught in a variety of subjects during my spare time.) And with all the resources available -- books, online tutorials, quora.com, wikipedia, etc -- it's not difficult to pick up the basics on your own.

As for my progress so far in web programming, I'm starting from the front-end basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript first. The past two weeks were spent on relearning HTML and CSS (I picked them up back in middle school but forgot over the years) and will hopefully start on basic javascript in about a week. By my personal metric of success, I'm pretty satisfied with my daily progress and can at least build basic websites that meets established web standards.

That would describe me as well, though I've taken up self-teaching myself web development since about a week or two ago. Though I come from a (traditional) business and psychology background in my studies, I feel most at home in the strong entrepreneurial culture of the tech space.

For your first question, as a non-tech person myself, I personally thought this place was a pretty good overview of all the options available for eventually attracting a tech cofounder:

http://viniciusvacanti.com/becoming-your-own-technical-co-fo...

To sum up the key points from that blog, it's basically: 1) Go work at a start-up 2) Become a key member of the tech community 3) Blog about your idea 4) Hire a programmer (to at least build a prototype) 5) Roll the dice on a stranger 6) Build your own prototype

Since what I was trying to build is not technically intensive, my personal choice was to learn some coding and build a rough prototype first.

I agree that it would be easier to just hire someone since my idea isn't tech intensive, but for a college student like me, I don't have $10k at my leisure for hiring someone, must less $30k to get to product/market fit. Which was why I decided to learn coding myself since I have time and labor, just not money. But like you said, the initial code would be messy and unscalable at first, so my goal at the moment is get to a working prototype and attract/partner up with good tech cofounder afterward who could rewrite the entire thing.

I agree it'll largely depend on the product I want to build. Fortunately for me, what I want to build is relatively simple technology compared to what I see a lot of programmers capable of making, and the most complex part is probably the psychological framework that I spent the past couple months researching and designing before I could even get started on the technical part.

I'm also aware that my coding skills will never outmatch someone else who probably started when they were 12 or something, at least not in a year. At the back of my mind, I know that programming will be hard, but at the front of my mind, I think my ignorance would probably be very useful for pushing me into something I can't turn back on.

Sure, it's a consumer app intended to help people with productivity and goal-achieving by directly influencing their behaviors through a psychological/behavior economical approach. Too many apps focused on technological efficiency (ie. a better way to list your goals, how to track your time, etc) and not much on the psychological aspect (ie. maintaining long-term motivation, getting started on chores you hate, etc).

In terms of stage, I'm pre-mockup at the moment since the last 2.5 months were spent on researching and designing the psychological framework before I could get started on the technological parts. It took up a lot of time but necessary since there was no previous framework for guidance.

I don't have a visual mockup yet, which I plan to start working on next week, but I do have a very fleshed out textual description of what was needed for the prototype to work.

Thanks, your story is definitely encouraging!

Thanks, it's definitely helpful as a comparison to my own activities the past month. Though in my case, I talked to an acquaintance about what I wanted to do and got his advices on what would be needed to build my idea, such as the languages, database, hosting, etc., so that I had an overall idea of how everything should work. Afterward, did a lot of background research too.

As for coding, part of the reason I'm not hiring a developer is because I don't have the money, so I'm making it up with having a lot of time and effort to spend.

Thanks for sharing, how did it turn out for you afterward? And even if it doesn't work out for the first idea, did you find your skills useful for later prospective ideas and partnerships?