Want to start a new company? We need developers and designers

I’m in search of designers and developers to work on a specific project. It’s going to be in competition with an existing site, so we are keeping the industry under the radar for now.

Market

The market is one that provides a service or product to businesses in Australia and New Zealand. There is a demonstrated and sizable market and ability to pay is high. The competition is poor, with the primary online competitor offering woeful usability and limited functionality.

The Team

The founding group are deep industry experts and have passion for what they do. They are looking for help with the website side of things and will give considerable autonomy to the developers and designers to identify and respond to customer needs as they grow the site. The founders  will drive initial sales, have strong contacts amongst potential clients and are receiving very encouraging signals.

The Product

The product is a relatively simple web application – providing a framework for the founders to complete with their industry-specific information. There is some ecommerce required to accept payments, and some work required to design the product in the outset and ongoing work to extend the product features. It provides genuine benefit to customers, making things easier, cheaper and better than existing industry solutions.

The Approach

If you saw Eric Reis at Webstock or Foo then you are off to a head start – and you’ll be able to put what you learned into practice. We will start small, iterate often, learn what customers do and focus on organic growth. The product will earn revenue from the outset – and has potential to grow at a very good rate. The design and dev team will work closely with the founders and myself, and take control and drive the key metrics.

Equity

This is an all-equity deal – in fact we’ll be asking you to stump up a little cash (a few hundred dollars) to purchase shares as we found the company. We have at least 30% of the company (perhaps 40% for the right team) to share between the developers and designers. We appreciate that paid work will often take priority, but you will also need the capacity to deliver in a reasonable timeframe. This will most likely not suit someone in a full-time job (unless it is in your own business)as we will need to meet during the day at times.

Location

The founders are based in Auckland and I’d prefer the rest of the team was, as well. We are also happy with folks based in Wellington – the coffe is much nicer and I live here (I visit Auckland most weeks.) I do feel strongly that face to face interaction is critical, so overseas is out, and regional NZ offers will be harder to land.

Technology

We need speed, low cost and something that lends itself to the application. Otherwise I’m pretty agnostic on technology – and will even entertain proposals from talented developers that want to use an appropriate technology that they are not familiar with. I’m a fan of what Rails is doing for development speed, and of open source in general. While scalability is important, it’s much better to get something up and worry about deep infrastructure issues when we have to.

Interested?

If you are interested then please get in touch. Soon. The opportunity is waiting and I really want to make this one happen.