How do you find developers that will join a new company?

I still cannot find where there might be a place where Senior developers who love to work in start ups can be found and who understand financial constraints etc and are willing to bet on you.

In general in a psychatric award - they have to be crazy to take that deal. Or must really believe you, but then unless they know you they wont. See, people making hugh claims about how wone day it may pay off for the developer are hundreds out there. Put an advertising out and spend a year to sort out the idiots.

Senios developers earn a lot of money. As freelancers it is not unheard of to start with about 20.000 USD per month upward (i.e. 20.000 is the lower end for a real senior). Heck, depending on what you like doing it can breach more than half a million - as employed programmer, especially if you know statistics. Your prospect has to come up quite some time above that - otherwise it is a bad bet to make. So, sorry - for most esgtablished programmers your constraints make the deal just not acceptable. Especially if they do not know you. Want to excite me? Put money on the table because words are cheap and as I said originally, if I want to work for a startup an get screwed - even then you have a low chance to have me working for you because you would be one of a thousand with the same idea and words of how great your project is.

So, your best bet is:

• Proove it can work, or hire out people that know you.
• Go with smart students. Yes, they may make crap but at the end of the day - as an american general once said, you dont fight a war with the army you like but with the army you have. So, if you can not afford a really senior good developer, then go with a smart student. A decent student can boast his profile well with a yar in an exciting project. I just hired one - half a year practicve, followed likely by a low paid year and a half - gives him a look into a very high paid professional work and a 2 year project on his resume so he can then go out and work as freelancer.

Check out "Should Tech Startups Outsource Product Development?" on TechCrunch.

Disclosure: There is a handful of startups in our client list.

Your vision of the product and it's potential has to excite the developers. It's akin to a film producer attracting an actor or a director.

Bear in mind, what engineers strive for is to have what they make be embraced by the whole world. (If an engineer tells you otherwise, you can bet he's not a great engineer.)

Your product idea has to at least have that potential of grandeur before you get down to the nitty gritty.