Joined 15 years ago
There is some evidence that depressive spells can lead to more clarity - this is wrapped up in the debate as to why depression exists in the first place. Additionally, the severity of the depression is a major factor - I have seen people entirely incapacitated by it, whereas others are able to effectively manage it using therapy and/or meds.
Also relevant is the nature/cause of the depression - it is possible to suffer from symptoms of depression (i.e. scoring highly on, say, the Beck depression inventory) that are largely situational - i.e. they are brought on by a job you hate, a bad relationship, etc. In these cases, doing a startup might actually be something that enables you to focus your energy and actually reduce or eliminate the symptoms entirely.
1. Set up OSCommerce or Magento site with design roughly copied from legit rights owner. 2. Get local 'middleman' to donate paypal account in return for small cut 3. Buy a bucket load of adwords 4. Run massive scale xrumer / scrapebox / etc 'SEO' campaign 5. Repeat thousands of times over
Getting domains de-indexed via the DMCA process on Google, never mind taking after-the-fact legal action, is just treating the symptoms.
Given that Paypal and Google are at the forefront of this issue, they are where the responsibility lies in terms of preventing the sites from transacting: by denying them a payment method and heaps of traffic respectively. I am sure that both companies are working hard on this issue, but having looked at the problem over the past couple of years, it hasn't always seemed to be that much of a priority.
Beyond that it is basically a question of international trade treaties and better local law enforcement in the territories where the offenders operate (predominately China) - i.e. NOT an easy fix.
You can understand the frustration of rights owners who are obviously going to take every opportunity to use legal action domestically. If they get a fairly tech illiterate decision in their favour that has potential dangerous consequences for the internet at large, then this is as much because they are just swinging at everything (back to those moles) than any great desire on their part to restrict legitimate rights and freedoms.
Finally, it is important to realise that this is not a victimless crime. What brought this home to me was a few years back when I overheard a nurse in the neonatal unit my son was being looked after in at the time excitedly talking about a pair of brand name boots she'd bought on the internet.
I realised that she had absolutely no clue they were fake because why should she? She had found the legitimate-looking site on the first page of Google and had paid with Paypal.
This was not a transaction carried out 'out the back of a van', where caveat emptor might more readily apply. A lot (majority?) of consumers don't realise that for all the brand loyality they might have in respect of Google and Paypal, etc^, they are services that are easily misused by unrelated third parties and so should not be taken as any sort of 'trust mark' in they way that shopping in large well-known department store does.
^Amazon and eBay deserve honourable mentions as being popular conduits for counterfeit scams too (although eBay in particular deserves a lot of credit for taking the subject more seriously than most).
The sites are removed when either law enforcement agencies or the rights owner take action (for example page 1 of the results for one term is,right now, showing 12 DCMA complaint notices, and have been a couple of fairly large scale operations by UK police to get domains taken down when there is proof of criminal acitivity).
If it were a handful or even a score, then I'd believe that "Google is able to detect and disregard the vast majority of hacked links". However, my personal experience suggests that whatever is left after this "vast majority" still constitutes an awful lot of links.
Of course, I am not arguing that Google is not able to detect a meaningful percentage of hacked links, and indeed I have direct experience of this.
My own site was compromised a few years back, i.e. hacked to serve a bunch of links to the usual suspects - porn, drugs and Australian footwear (using a particularly nasty script that inserted the links only when the visitor was Googlebot otherwise it just returned an empty div - 100% my fault for being tardy in my patching schedule as it was using a widely available cms script) and this led to my site (as the 'victim' site) dropping dramatically in rank, only to recover once I had cleaned up the mess, patched the exploit and completed a re-inclusion request.
However, that so many sites using basic link spam approaches were able to rank so highly for such a sustained period suggests that the current capabilities are far from perfect - right now I can see a site in position 2 that only uses blog spam, is fairly new and is selling illegal counterfeit products. It simply should not be there (outranking the brand website), nor should the other 5 similar sites also on page 1.
Anyway, I obviously appreciate that Google faces an insanely difficult task in dealing with web spam, and the situation I refer to above is (despite the current spate) a lot better than it was 2 years ago, when it was crazily out of hand. Nevertheless, tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds have been lost by consumers to these sites in the same period (most of whom have such a high level of trust in Google as a brand that they rightly believe that anything showing up on page 1 is likely to be legit).
If you can teach yourself visual basic then I'd suggest that you teach yourself some programming. You are unlikely to acquire enough to do the heavy lifting on this venture, but every hour you spend learning how to manipulate your chosen technology stack will pay dividends.
After a while will be able to speak the language of potential co-founders, and you will even be able to look at their code and comment intelligently.
If you have any sort of eye for design, then learning (or improving your skills in) html, css and copy n' paste jquery will allow you to do the marketing site, email newsletters and the like whilst your technical co-founder builds the product.
Anyway, if you are out their pitching and getting feedback, then you are going to find someone sooner or later. There is a heap of advice on the web (like going to tech meetups and events) that you should be following if you are not already doing so.
And if you want to know how I do it? I've always just written a stand out job advert that is designed to speak to the 1% of people who might be interested and post it on the startup orientated job boards and Uni temporary work websites. It has worked 100% of the time for me. If you do have connections (i.e. the ex-agency) who are technical you can get them to help you interview if you are worried about not sounding credible - just introduce them as advisers or something.
Finally, on the subject of hiring contractors do build prototypes, my personal view (from experience) is proceed with massive caution in doing this. You might be better to conserve your cash to help tempt a proper co-founder, who if they are half decent will get something built 3-4x faster than hired help. You (almost certainly) aren't going to get funded with a contractor-built prototype that will be, in effect, a black box to you and your potential investors, so all you are really doing is dulling the pain that you should be focusing 100% on.
1. say what your idea is. Or at least the sector / problem you are addressing.
2. say what technology set you are using. You say you are currently getting a 'prototype website' built, so you have a stack - what is it.
3. as you aren't a technical founder, are you a domain expert (i.e. if the product is, say, financial services related, then presumably you have would have a track record in this sector). If so, then big up yourself.
4. Be positive. This whole post is (to me at least) far too negative. From "shotinthedark" and "slim to none", to your story about the web agency dropping you. Full marks for being honest, but presentation counts for a lot and again if you aren't the technical guy, you need to be the 'hustle' guy and that means everying (every email, chat, etc) needs to be +ve!
As for finding a technical co-founder it is definitely possible (I've done it a couple of times). Think of it as pre-qualifier for having a shot at further challenges (funding, getting customers, etc). If you can't convince one person to work on your idea, then something is seriously wrong. Especially if you have some funds (given that you are paying a developer and designer, you must have at least enough for covering someone's basic living costs).
If I were you I'd delete this post, and rewrite it as a compelling story about why someone should come work with you. You must think you are on to the opportunity of a lifetime - so "tell them about the dream" (to quote Mahalia Jackson).
