I'm a solid programmer with 5+ years of experience in software development. I know how to do things from beginning to the end and want to start my own company. I spend for more them 6 months in search of persons who really knows business and it's demands and no success.
I monitored lots of co-founders sites and tired of "idea" guys with "new" ideas of social networks, job sites, deals sites, impressive educational sites, "new" youtubes like ideas that will "break" my mind. Also I don't want to invest my time and money to students with same ideas that doesn't have any real life and especially business experience.
All I want is just to find person from small\middle business that want to build system that will help him to solve his problems. I'm ready to build myself system\website for free for such person and make on top of that solution my company.
I think this is equal deal cause I will solve real problem of real person for free and make money by selling solution to people from similar industry of that man for money.
But I'm stuck, I didn't find such online community\forum\website with such kind of business guys...
Would thank a lot if somebody suggest some or give contacts of owners of real business that wants to improve by going online or simplify it by web solutions.
Regards, Alex.
Co-Founder Business Partnerships
I can sympathize with you. I think I did pretty much the same process myself. But that was many years ago and I came to understand that this approach is too fuzzy to land the deal you want.
A while back, I worked for a very nice software company that did property management software. One of the observations that I heard there was that it was much easier to teach a person who had property management experience how to program than to teach a programmer the property management terrain.
So here's an alternative approach to your problem. Keep and refine your IT skills while you talk to lots of business owners. Find out what their pains are. After you have talked a while and you begin to understand, you will feel like you can offer a solution. Don't. Keep talking and keep trying to understand.
After you have talked to owners of restaurants about the problems they have with controlling food costs and talked with automotive body shops about getting cars in and out in the least amount of time and talked with realtors about staying on top of the market and even maybe mortuaries on providing the very best and most meaningful experience they can in very difficult times, then you may see that there is a place you can help. Consider getting a job in the office of one of these places.
Frequently, the causes of business pain are fuzzy in nature. They are people problems. They aren't well stated. See if you can turn such a problem into a technical problem instead. Technical problems can be well stated. They can be solved. And converting fuzzy, poorly defined, people problems into solved technical problems is what makes businesses like MacDonald's and FedEx the world leaders that they are.
I know that probably seems like a bigger job than you intended, but practice it, even on a small scale, and you can become the person that people look to for solutions. Then you will have the deal you want.