Sometimes, you have to entice people to commit

Working alone is tough, there is only so much memory, attention and knowledge that a single person has. Not to mention that the cutting edge of technology is a moving target-- what you don't release this year might be outdated by the next. If you want to make a killer product of service, you have to make something good and do it quickly. My best analogy to this would be like learning to ski well-- learn to lean forward, even to the point that you think you might do a barrel roll, do that.... and lean forward some more.

I've been in a recruitment phase for finding a community of smart people to work on projects with and eventually turn those into a viable service or product and there are great opportunities out there for data mining/business intelligence type applications. There is so much on the internet that we have just begun to scratch the surface, but people know that the market is there and there are many startups that are moving into this realm.

There is only so much that I can do on my own and that has been one of the biggest realizations for me. Yes, it is true that I could probably learn what I needed to know to do something, but it takes time to be a master at sometime. If you truly want to do something big, you're going to need a team of people to do it, a tight group of smart people.

I've been making some programmer friends recently and I've made several pitches to try and get a project off the ground. Yes, I can convince them that some of my ideas are interesting, I also enjoy bouncing ideas to find new avenues of use. I have some code written and some proof of concept, but I need to learn how to make people to commit. I tend to generally be soft on people, like when I tell them "spare whatever time you have" or "get things done whenever you can," to be honest going easy on people like that is a mistake and you'll get no real commitment from them; unless of course, that the people you are talking to implicitly feel strongly that you are going to succeed with or without them (but still, it is a weak play).

If you want people to commit to working on a project with you, you do have to entice them. Show them that the project has momentum, that you are strong willed and believe that it is a good idea and that if they want to join up that they have a short but reasonable time to do so, because people usually don't do things unless there is a deadline to for decision; it is simply human nature (oddly enough, I think it is similar to dating and that you shouldn't give a person that you really like the opportunity to go out with you whenever they feel like it because you are implicitly saying that you don't value yourself that highly... but I digress).

In short, you have to act with urgency and find ways of making what you do a priority for other people if you want them to join up or else things will happen "whenever," which translates to "never."