Looking for YC advice:
I am the non technical co founder of a startup, which has been in development mode for 12 months. I took a $30,000 loan and raised some $160,000 in funding from friends and an angel to develop an idea to the proof of concept stage. I found a Django technical developer 14 months ago, and initially have paid her $6900 a month and 6% of the company equity to build a decent prototytpe, with an expectation of ratching it up in the longer term. She quoted it would take her 6 months of full time work to do this.
4 months into development, she threatened to bail on the project and raise funding for her own startup idea unless I increased her equity stake to 35%. I was initially very upset by this change, as I had been up front and honest from the beginning and I didn't like the idea of switching terms midway through the project. I felt there was an asymmetry in our risk, as I quit my nursing job to do this and raised all the capital. She also refused to take a pay cut in return for the equity. I had limited alternative developer options to leverage in the situation.
I eventually agreed because without a proof of concept,I knew we wouldn't make it, and it seemed we were getting close to launch. I thought I would rather have a real partner than a long term contract developer, and adjusted to the concept if both being in it full time. I have taken a 55% pay cut to work on the startup, and have been paying myself $3000 a months, which comes to about $2400 incomes after taxes.
12 months later, we have a partially complete web app, have run out of money, and she has bolted back to her contract gigs. She hasn't finished the work to the point where I can do a beta, as the alpha feedback has not been incorporated into the software.
She refuses to invest any of her own money into the idea, I don't want to "get a real job" because I won't be able to work on the startup idea. I have very little money left in the bank. Raising more capital is really hard, because we haven't executed on our milestones. I refuse to give up on the idea, and I know that the window of opportunity is only a few months.
I am considering outsourcing the development to India, so I can get it to a releasable state. I have the source code and am also considering learning Django from scratch: How hard would that be?
Where should I go from here? Any thoughts gratefully received.
drinko
Make sure you have milestones setup in your development process. If she said it would take 6 months then make sure at 4 months your developer is at a reasonable place, hell make sure at 2 months that they are, if they aren't then it's time to reconsider the contract.
If they estimated it would take 6 months to do then by 4 months 90% of the site should be done, the other 90% is the smaller fixes, tweaks etc that always take a long time but a good developer will have learned to account for these in their estimate, but you should have a functioning(although not totally) site that far in.
I'm not one for micromanaging or the non-technical boss watching over the hackers shoulder every 2 minutes getting in the way, but it really shouldn't have been allowed to drag on for 12 months without a product. After missing the first estimate without a full application(even if it was a buggy one) you are going to have serious problems and should be looking for someone else because they are either too inexperienced to estimate their own work, too inexperienced to break their estimates down, or not doing their work.