Your opinion matters - What would you do?
Hello community, hope you're doing well at this particular time.
4 things you need to know:
- I started working on a marketplace business for second hand fashion shops during 2020.
- I was funded to the tune of 25k by an "incubator" for this "idea".
- I have worked on multiple value propositions around this marketplace idea (B2C/B2B/B2B2C) but the "better than competition features" of the marketplace are useless without cash.
- I think it will be more interesting to work on something else in this marketplace, but what I'm thinking of requires code.
Here's the point:
My incubator-investor is telling me to pay an agency to build my MVP (for $10,000), but I think it's better to take 6 months and half the budget to learn to code and be able to prototype, sell and launch SaaS products on my own.
Good to know, I need their approval to use the money.
I can see and understand now that my incubator investors are not at all interested in "indie hacking" and "bootstrapping" ways. Instead, they prefer to pay agencies to build things, push founders into debt and seek government grants.
I'm afraid they think it's not in their interest, that I'd rather become a developer and lose their investment.
What do you think about that ? Do you prefer to pay for fish or pay to learn fishing ?
Have a great day, I look forward to hearing more from you dear indie hackers.
I'm a software engineer, I mentored a few dozens of junior developers, some started with no coding background at all. I believe you'll be much better off by learning how to code, as you'll have a better understanding of the intricacies and complexities when it comes to building software.
More importantly, with the knowledge you have, you're better equipped to avoid being ripped off by agencies
Took several days to think about all of this, talk with some friends.
I have almost the same conclusion as you do. I deeply convinced that it is far better to learn fishing instead of buy fish.
What advice would you give me about this learning journey ? I already it'll be hard, maybe you call tell me more about how and what.
I'll exercice the all summer from now before the beginning of my bootcamp and find no matter what the money. Just finished CCS/HTML courses on freecodecamp last friday, I'm going through JavaScript now !
Thank you for your support !
Learning to code would be great, but I think there is another way, use no/low-code platforms to build your marketplace.
I don’t know what unique value you have compared to other marketplaces, so I don’t know what you exactly need, but you could take a look at sharetribe.com to build a simple first version within probably hours.
From there on you can use bubble to create a webapp, Adalo to create native apps for example.
If it really takes off you can always decide to learn to code and code it, but I think it’s pretty hard to learn to code and code a complete market place in 6 months on your own.
Thank you for your answer Dylan.
Actually I don't think it is worth it to create a marketplace but a SaaS instead to automate things on big players ones (Depop, Vinted...)
The SaaS I'm talking about requiers JS, Node, Puppeteer stuff.
Some developers I talked to told it is not that complex and that it always good to learn coding.
Cheers !
Oh mb!
Learning to code is never wasted time, so that’s good, but 6 months is long and maybe you will even need more time.
I assume the debt is on your company and not on you personally, if so the following:
But now I am thinking about it I don’t really see the problem. You both want a MVP, you want to code it yourself and he wants an agency to make it. Why is it so important for you to code specifically this project yourself? You can simply start a new side project next to this and learn coding while making that!
Obviously just go with the agency get it build and make it happen quick! What you want to do in your free time is up to you:)
If you get personal debt from this then I honestly wouldn’t do it unless you have a biggg list of customers waiting to use it.
I agree, I would never get personally in debt.
I'll listen to you and get in touch with agencies in order to know how much it could costs.
Where do you come from Dylan ?
Great to hear you don’t make personal debt! Then it really is a no brainer I think:)
I am from the Netherlands.