From ideas to reality. Anyone?

[James]

So, I’m quite the knowledge when it comes to HTML/5, CSS/3, including it’s newly formed pre-processors, I’m good with .ASP, PHP Javascript and so on and so on. Lets forget about skills for a moment.

I have had a a fully spanned out project that I’ve been working on for months, coming over to a year, as part of a design project but I want to put everything I know together and make it functional; just as a personal project. I already have the bones there, such as the HTML & CSS, all the frontend pages are looking top notch, but now I want to throw PHP/Ruby in to the mix and host it on relied servers for the beginning process of the business.

Now obviously doing this on my own would be an achievement within itself and highly doubt I would have the time to push such a project out.

What I’m saying is, how do these small ideas from single individuals expand in to a global pandemics on the web? Such as Instagram . Where does a single person go from square one on a piece of paper to end up in his own office suite? I’m still at such a young age currently in University, but it strikes me how product development evolves in to such mass. Did companies like Instagram start out by hosting on external servers from just one or a few people as a small service, or was it a written project by an already established company?

It baffles me every time. I have such a unique art project that has developed it’s way to static pages, but what would I do next excluding hiring people? Would hiring/working with a team of your own work to advantage? Obviously there’s advertising a product by using methods to spread it out, but you must be ready to deploy the application upon advertising without clinging on to interested clients that are eager to use a service.

I’m really interested in this kind of subject as it’s something I’m writing about and finding it hard to surpass a few pages without writing what I’ve already written.

What are your thoughts/knowledge?

[ooredroxoo]

Some people just look for investors, here on Brazil we have some workshops sponsored for big companies that invest money in some Ideas, we have some events that unite people with different skills to make a product, found a start-ups how they call here, usually with low costs of operation, and with spare time from the participants.

You could search for people on your region, on Craig’s list, this forum, some people that wanna join your venture, that believe that your Idea can become the next big thing, and that are willing to refine and improve with you to make a awesome product. Folks with passion for the product, not the money.

But you can look for the business man view too, the Team Threehouse has some videos that explain how start a business, create a business plan, get a loan, hire people and so on.

[Bonzai]

A good route to go down when taking on a very large project would be to get a few more people on board to help with completing a beta version of the project. If you don’t have funds to pay someone a salary, it might be worth trying to find someone that will be willing to work for a share in idea.

Once you have a stable version of the product/service – You can now start approaching investors and try and get a few companies to invest in your product, which would allow you to get better hosting and funds to hire more people help develop and market the project.

[Mottie]

I think an awesome place to ask questions like this is at [Quora](http://www.quora.com/). You can get answers directly from the people who have been there and have done the work.

For example, this question is [What books are on your “must read” list for web startups](http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-books-are-on-your-must-read-list-for-web-startups)? Look at the people who have answered.

Or this question: [If you were to incrementally grow a web product development team from 1 to 15 persons, what would be the ideal order to hire each positions?](http://www.quora.com/If-you-were-to-incrementally-grow-a-web-product-development-team-from-1-to-15-persons-what-would-be-the-ideal-order-to-hire-each-positions).

That site and tons of other interesting questions and answers. I could spend hours reading.

[Author]

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