If you can't afford to hire a coder (freelancers can be fairly inexpensive, but be sure to define the project well), your main choices would be to find a script that does what you need (check sites like hotscripts.com) or partner with someone. The partner could either be a financial backer (provides cash to pay for a coder, graphic designer, hosting, etc.) or a coder himself/herself (does the programming for equity in the business).

To attract a partner, you'll probably have to have at least a simple business plan that shows how you'll recover your costs and make money. Be sure you have legalities tidied up if you partner with someone - after the initial enthusiasm wanes, things can get messy if the details aren't spelled out on paper.

If this is a hobby effort, look around and see if you can find someone who shares your interest and is looking for a fun project with little expectation of profit.

[edited by: rogerd at 1:59 pm (utc) on Sep. 7, 2006]
[edit reason] personal info removed [/edit]

Tell him that being an Internet entrepreneur will look great on your college applications! ;)

As far as finding someone to help out, the same advice applies - if you aren't going to hire a freelancer, find someone who shares your enthusiasm and has sufficient coding skills to do what you need.

If you think there's any chance that it will turn into a real business, though, be sure to define your deal terms precisely. You don't want to start an equal partnership with someone who works for a week or two and then fades away. (I've seen it happen more than once - everybody is gung ho at the start of the effort, but after a while some get interested in other things and vanish.) Make any ownership stake contingent on completion of the tasks and/or ongoing effort.

For moderate software tweaking, you could probably find a coder on elance or rentacoder that would do it for a few hundred bucks. That might seem like a big hobby expense now, but it might be better than depending on a volunteer helper or enlisting a partner that you'll be stuck with forever.

You might also check out the free tools at ning.com - they might have something like what you are looking for.

Another thought. Get some free quotes from coders, figure out what hosting, etc. will cost so that you can determine what your costs will be in the first year. Add some additional dollars for stuff you haven't anticipated, which there WILL be. Round up to the nearest thousand dollars. Then tell Dad you are looking for an "angel investor" who will fund your startup with that amount in return for, say, 20% of the company. Then tell him it's such a neat opportunity, you'd like to keep it in the family, so you'll give him first shot at the deal. :)

It's not a handout, it's an investment! ;)

Compare the modest investment in a little coding to the cost of an expensive summer enrichment program...

It actually seems pretty weird for me to ask my dad to help me with setting up some stuff when he has a a lot more better things to do.

I can't think of a more important thing for him to do. There are business deals, and there are business deals - there will always be another business deal.

He only gets to help his son grow up once.

I'll bet he's willing to at least point you in the right direction.

Every parent has a different idea of how much "help" - and of what nature - they should give their children. So, let your past experience be your guide.

(Personally, I'm of the "teach a man to fish" camp. Frankly, I have friends who have had it all handed to them, and if the money ever runs out, they won't know what to do.)

Its the fact that it might fail makes me not wanna ask ppl.

You will. If not this time, another. It's more important to learn to fail and then come back from it, than to win every time. Because you won't.

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If you have any interest at all in software development, teach yourself Perl or PHP. (I'm partial to Perl myself.) Put your idea on the back-burner for a while and just soak it in. Particularly for Perl, once you have taught yourself the basics (The classic book "Learning Perl" is a really good starting point) you can start to explore the huge world of free Perl "packages" (pre-written software components) that will make your job much, much simpler.

Pick the right packages, apply the programming knowledge you have learned, and you should be able to at least prototype your idea.

Almost any new, unique website idea is going to require programming. By working in a sufficiently-powerful general-purpose language (Perl, PHP, C++, Java, etc.) you can take fine-grained control of every aspect of a website. If you have any intention of developing new, unique website ideas in the future, learn programming. Even if you don't intend to do the programming yourself - you need to understand what is and is not possible, so that you can effectively communicate with programmers to implement your idea(s).

Well, I just found something called connotea code

Well, I can't comment on the suitability for your idea, since I don't know what you have in mind. But it sure looks like a good starting point.

It's a bookmarking site for "clinicians and scientists". More importantly, the source code (in Perl, using MySQL for database store) for the site is available under the GPL. Which means it's written in a powerful, popular general-purpose programming language, it's free, and is extensible. And it looks like the code was designed specifically with modification in mind, as it has a plug-in architecture.

They've anticipated what things others might want to modify, and built-in hooks to make it easy to do so. (This is important - if you can keep your modifications to the configuration files and additional plugins that you add yourself, then you can probably continue to update the main application as they come out with new versions.)

This gives you a working bookmarking site from the git-go, and ultimately no restrictions (given sufficient time, energy, and knowledge) on what you can ultimately make it do. A good approach, IMO.

While you still think it's fun ;o)

P.

While you still think its fun? Wth do u mean?

I think he means that eventually it will start to look like "work".

But lets try not to use dirty words around an impressionable 14 year old! ;)