[ooshma]

Gobble is my second company. With my first company, I bootstrapped and never raised outside capital. I got introduced to a consultant by a friend and I paid him to build our first product part-time and help manage an engineering team in India and I contributed front end and simple back end code myself. The initial MVP (minimum viable product) of a company is typically very scrappy and taped together. If you know how to write software, you do it yourself. If not, you can do it in a very scrappy way and do not feel ashamed to do so. Ideally, ad especially with consumer applications, the initial focus is just proving your concept and seeing if it will get any traction or make any money, before investing heavily in a fuller or more perfect product.

With Gobble, I discuss the answer elsewhere in this thread. Two engineers were moonlighting with me to learn RoR and see what it was like to work at a startup. We built a very simple website to display meals and collect sales for a few months. That basic site, along with PDF mockups I designed of our future product, was enough to raise seed money. I hired one of the engineers full time after I raised the funding. Then, I started meeting everyone I could in my extended network and recruiting the rest of the team.