We're a small team of two programmers, and we've just launched our MVP (www.pushlayer.com, if you're interested). It's a service geared towards iOS developers, and we're looking for someone to help us out with the legwork of getting feedback to validate our concept.<p>We've been spreading the word ourselves, and tapping our own connections for feedback, but as our backlog grows, we'd love to get someone else involved to help us continue spreading the word.<p>Has anyone successfully found another person (even someone just helping out in their spare time) at this stage of their company? We're wary of any true "marketing" person, as we're really looking to reach out to fellow programmers.<p>Thanks for any and all advice!
I wouldn't at your stage, at such an early stage the founders need to be interacting with users, you'll lose too much (information) in communication overheads if you bring in someone to do it.
Would be too shocking if I consider this a "How to find a non-technical co-founder" question?<p>Because I think that is just what you need. I don't think a freelance, temporary or part-time marketing person would be a good choice. A real co-founder, responsible for marketing your product would be ideal. Someone that could hack the distribution part of your product.<p>Actually, I don't have any practical tips of how to find this person, but my advice is that you should think of her as an essential part of the team, not a disposable labor with a specific mechanical job. Don't be the "code guy" versio of the HN stereotyped "idea guy".<p>Maybe something you could try is trying to find, on startups' events, that non-developer young guy, who is kind of lost there, not pitching any of his ideas, just trying to understand this environment and learn a few things. My guess is that this persona, with the right potential skills, could be a good distribution co-founder.
I have a background in marketing/sales/adwords/social-media-hacking, and im finishing up a 3-month web-dev course.
I guess you can say I will be able to speak the language of your target clients (i'll have to read through some objective-c tuts to really know what they struggle with).<p>What kind of work are you looking to get done specifically?
Two things that I would do is: spend about 5 hours a week on Quora tapping iOS developers, spend about 5-10 hours a week on StackOverflow tapping iOS developers. All non-spammy.<p>Other things to do are: guest-blogging, requesting reviews.<p>Work requirements would include advanced analytics of incoming links to see how all of the off-site activity is performing.
I'm not sure I would get it out to more users, yet. If your still working out a large backlog of issues you may want to focus on the product. If you have a small but dedicated group of users, you might want to focus on making the product better until that users are refering others to the point its starting to grow on its own. Then, you know your product is ready for hockeystick growth.
Have you given any thought as to how you might grow later on, when you want to scale? I ask because this is a good opportunity for you to also test (“validate” as you put it) that part of your business concept.