Bitcoin Forum

Am I wasting my time seeing if I can find a web developer who:

1) Is willing to invest time into a potentially risky project and get paid a percentage of profit instead of an upfront price
and
2) Knows at least a little bit about working with bitcoin from a web application
and
3) Can somehow guarantee they won't just take the idea if they think it's profitable

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this is really unreasonable, but I might as well ask.

It is. Why would anyone go for a percentage of a low profit anyway when he can earn a good hourly rate? ;)

You need a fun project so that people put in their spare time because they want - for a hobby project. But for a project that is profit oriented, sorry, there is this thing called "market rate". Profit share? Sure. Distribute 90% to the people making the work, as shares (ownership) and make sure it is 4-5 tims market rate later (i.e. a good project) and you can talk to good people ;)

Of course no one could say it was 100% not worth your time. You may find someone and it could work out for you. But the percentage chance you'll find someone and it will all work out well is so low... so very low...

Everyone has ideas. Everyone. You either need to have the money, skill and/or fortitude to make them happen. The journey from idea to product is what stops most because the idea itself is not good enough.

If you have money, pay them normally. If you don't, get a loan and pay the developer normally. If you can't do these things and instead simply hope to find someone who'll do it for "backend" payment, you'll likely get desperate developers or developers who want to learn on the job. If you care about the project you don't want either of those type of developers working on it.

You're also dealing with the fact that bitcoin is fairly new. The API is not something known by many people so your chance of finding a developer who already knows how to work with it are lower, and those developers by default would be charging more since they have working knowledge of it.

As for guarantees, what guarantees does the coder have that YOU wouldn't steal it? Neither of you has a guarantee, which is why we work hourly, weekly, biweekly, whatever, with deposits and payments during the project, etc.

Yes.

Don't worry about it. Ideas aren't even worth a dime a dozen anymore.

Fair point - I should have mentioned I've actually got a service written and I'm just interested in someone who will make a web interface for it, so it's not just the idea I'd be contributing. But either way you guys pretty much confirmed my expectations, thanks.

Paul Graham (a co-founder of ycombinator.com startup micro-funding agency I suppose) has a lot of articles of ideas not worthing a penny these days. See http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html and his other essays.