how do I hire people when the company is not making any money?

I'm not sure "team of developers" and "not make money for the foreseeable future" are congruent in this economy. I think the mobile phone app business really needs to be bootstrapped.

I worked for two years part time before taking a the plunge and going full time on my own business, and I had a secondary business to supplement my income. I think you need to stick it out longer and at least start generating some revenue, but quitting your current source of income.

The only thing you have is stock, and we both know the stock is worthless for now, and probably forever.

That means you need a co-founder -- someone willing to work for nothing just like you are.

(Some people say "deferred compensation," but that's illegal if you do it wrong, possibly illegal completely in your state, and has tax consequences.)

Gangadhar,

What you are asking is like saying I want all my friends to buy me presents, but I'm not going to give them anything.

We started our company in Canada in 1997 before everyone was buzzing about "dot,coms". Now it is 2009 and we are one of the few that survived.

During the last 11 years I've seen many businesses come and go. While some with very strong leaders were able to attract people to work for them for free, especially in the "early days", those were very rare.

What's more you aren't promising much, you've said upfront that it's going to be 1-2 years before there is any hope of any return. That is not a 'unique selling proposition' to inspire people to follow you.

1. If you quit you day job, how are you going to support yourself for 1-2 years?

2. How can you inspire people to follow you when you make success sound unlikely before you've begun?

3. You've talked about the technology so far - what about the market opportunity? If you want to get people to work for you for free you need to sell the proverbial sizzle, not the steak. In today's economy expect things to be a lot harder than they have been in the past.

I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day who is doing similar things to you, but with a very different approach. He has a division of his own business that is very lucrative and he uses that money to fund his "projects of hope" ... the projects that he hopes will make him a lot of money one day for very little work.

The world is full of people with great ideas. (I've been sitting on an idea I think is really good for 2.5+ years but won't invest in it because I think Canada is the wrong market to launch it in.) It is astonishing how often the same idea get tossed around. Yet how many of those go on to be the next Twitter? 1 in 1,000,000? (Those odds are probably to high.)

My advice: learn from the mistakes of others. Study the best open source projects and learn from them how you can best grow your business idea.

Then adjust your message. Know where your value is and inspire others to follow you by getting them excited about the opportunity you are presenting. Talk to VCs and most will ask first about the management team. What they are looking for are the people who have been able to inspire others to follow them and as a result have grown in spite of the odds against them.

Parting thought: I was chatting with a Silicon Valley VC the other day that is scouting for deals in Canada. When I asked about VC funding opps today he said that great companies will always get a good price. Good companies will get investments, but in today's economy they may have to give up a little. The rest are not going to get financed.

-- Julie

I'd say you have three options:

1. Don't quit your day job. Work it until you are making at least 2x more than what you make in your job (stability factor).

2. Get funding. This is difficult right now, but it's an option. Get funding, then get the developers. Not the other way around.

3. Get a developer who's willing to work for equity. You don't need a team of developers in most cases to produce a product which people are willing to pay for.

My point is you need money no matter what. You can get that either through getting someone else to give you money (investment) or actually making your product profitable from the get-go. I prefer the latter, but to each their own.

Free is not the future of apps

I'd say, don't hire. If you don't have money to pay them. Being a founder and an employee are very different mindset. And it's almost always that people who join later as being hired, almost always has that mindset. So they're basically, in it for the pay, and then the other benefits second. Of course, that motivation can change over time, depending on how they see themselves working in your startup.

An "easy" way to find people to work for your moneyless startup, are to find friends who also share your motivation to see your startup succeed; and to work for the startup without income should be the first requirement. Also, don't try to promise the future, that we're going to make lots of moolah, because honestly, that's just impractical.

Or, another option, just don't hire. Find a way to do it by yourself, everything; start with something you can manage, look for that first paying client, then move up from there. Focus on making most of the tasks on auto-pilot. Like for support/marketing, build a passionate community that takes care of new customers (e.g. getsatisfaction.com)-- and give them the freedom to own and take charge. :)

You cannot hire people if you cannot pay them. You would be breaking minimum wage laws in some states. You can only bring people as consultant/contractor and pay them with equity. Then you can switch to an employee model