Derek Sivers is a great blogger, as well as an inspiration to me as an entrepreneur.  And in his latest blog post, he touches on an issue, how one goes about hiring a programmer for an idea they want to bring to life, that I find very important and useful.

I have written about the notion of Minimum Viable Product before and Sivers's post is really the first step towards an MVP.  But he takes it through a great, step by step, simple process and makes it very digestable and actionable.  I get a ton of questions from friends and associates around this issue so now I have a fantastic resource to point them to.

To summarize, here are Derek's steps, but the whole post is worth reading.

1. Reduce your big idea to “Version 1.0”.
2. Write a simple overview of what it does.
3. Write a detailed walk-through of every click.
4. Break it up into milestones.
5. Make your first milestone a stand-alone project.
6. Post it at elance, guru, odesk, vworker.
7. Hire one from each.
8. Continue with the one you like best.

By the way, I fully agree with his steps 7 and 8, even though they will seem reduntant to most people.  The power of a superstar developer is hard to overestimate.