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I was in a similar position three months ago. I had an idea for a website that I was incredibly excited about, but no programming experience. (And no business experience, either! My major is creative writing.) At first I did the natural thing for a "non-technical co-founder": I asked every programmer I could find if they wanted to build the product for me in exchange for equity in my unfunded company. Needless to say, this did not work out. I decided to teach myself how to do it, which meant starting from the very beginning. I bought a "For Dummies" book on HTML, CSS and JavaScript (Yes, it was really that bad! Back when I took a web design course in high school, they were still teaching us to format with tables.) and worked my way up to more serious books on MySQL, PHP, and jQuery, all the while working on my website. I now have a beta version of the site online, and I'm testing it with friends and family. I've also learned enough about programming to get a part-time job as a developer at another company. (Not the highest-paying developer job, but still! Real US currency, and the beta version of my website was my only resume.) There are still tons of things that I want to add to my website that I don't know how to build yet, and many aspects of the design that I'm not happy with, but that's okay! Only three months ago I didn't even know CSS! At least now I have a working demo that I can show to potential team members, investors, and future clients. If you're already programming as a hobby, you'll probably love programming as a job, and you're a lot further along than I was when I started. The only way to build a web app is to build it. And I promise you that until you start building it you have not even begun to conceptualize it! Don't underestimate the difficulty of the intellectual challenges you're going to face. But don't be daunted by the challenges, either. I can speak as someone who started with literally "just an idea". I think you'll be surprised by how much you'll be able to build in just six months. |
Thanks for the advice - hugely helpful!