[noelwelsh]

Generally good stuff. Not sending a resume is interesting -- I bet there are people who would expect one and argue the opposite.

What really struck me were two things:

- Outsourcing the MVP. I've seen a few people do it but it seems a very expensive way to get started. Wouldn't it be easier to pitch for funding/a technical partner without this?

- Building a recommendation engine in Ruby? Really? I've never used Ruby for numeric code but I wouldn't think it would be particularly fast and it doesn't have libraries equivalent NumPy AFAIK.

(Don't feel you have to vote this up. I'm on 666 karma right now. ;-)

[technotony]

I think outsourcing the MVP is a great way to go in the current climate. Pitching for funding without a technical co-founder is impossible beyond a friends and family round, at least in the established startup hubs. It's also very hard to find a good technical partner without already having demonstrated some traction: this makes sense as good technical partners have many options and want to see that you can deliver the non-technical side of the business (40% of a company worth 0 is still 0!).

So in this context spending a little savings on an MVP is a great way to go, it lets you show traction to get the funding or technical partner and can be done by raising from friends/family or working nights at another job.

[jph]

Ruby's great for recommendation engines and JRuby has all the Java libraries. Programming Collective Intelligence is a good starter book:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596529325?tag=loucalnet-20&cam...;