[zeemonkee]

A "business person" may be a domain expert in a vertical market. They may have an idea that requires an insight that only comes from years of working inside an industry that a developer, unless they have also worked in that industry, will simply not have. Furthermore the "business person" will be able to network in that industry.

[btilly]

I've seen this happen.

I've seen people claim that this will happen.

Based on what I've seen, the odds that the claim is accurate in any particular case are very low.

[jerf]

I think this is the black swan of the unsolicited ideas. Do they exist? Sure. I'm sure there's at least one out there. But it's not a case that everyone who wants to talk about swans has to spend a lot of time accounting for. Usually the unsolicited idea is "Clone $BIG_NAME_SERVICE for $500" with an optional rider of "specialized in a fully, profoundly unspecified manner for some set of people".

[drzaiusapelord]

Except "business person" has no idea how to market applications, what works with online marketing, and how to effectively communicate what the application does. Let alone how to sell apps commercially to skeptical deep pocketed IT buyers who ask questions regarding such "arcane" things like HIPPA or SOX or assurance or compatibility with large enterprise solutions.

His big contacts file is useless because his domain is in selling real estate not selling real estate apps.

[zeemonkee]

Generally I've found domain experts to have a healthy respect for other professions, including developers. I'm not talking about the caricature Craigslist mouth-breather with the awesome let's-clone-Facebook-for-$200 idea.

Sure, the real estate seller may not know about apps, but they do know what works and what doesn't work in the real estate market, what the potential legal issues may be, and where the pain points are. I've never worked in real estate, so I don't.

I suspect that's why so many pure-developer run startups are either things that only interest other developers (project management tools and the like) or things that "everybody" knows about, e.g. yet another Twitter client or social networking thingamajig. There's a ton of cash in vertical markets we don't touch because we don't know the right people in those industries to partner with.

The successful businesses I've worked in(startups that went on to achieve success, or already successful small to medium sized businesses) have all been in vertical markets - from forestry to tourism to retail marketing. You couldn't have built these on developer savvy alone. That may go against the HN philosophy that software developers are the be all and end all of startups, but the reality is that most successful businesses need teams of people of different backgrounds.

[fauigerzigerk]

That's absolutely right. And even if it sounds slightly outlandish here, I think, that's how most businesses are actually created.

[marknutter]

Yeah, but then a 50/50 split would make sense, not the 10/90 or 2/98 that they typically ask for.