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:
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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.
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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!
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.