Notice how a lot of the answers form a single connected thread: how hard it is to get users, that doing so depends on making what they want, and that to make what they want you have to understand them (instead of working on some idea conceived in a vacuum).
My personal takeaways:<p>Mike Arsenault's suggestion of the Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensit...</a><p><a href="http://orconsulting.com/blog/?p=133" rel="nofollow">http://orconsulting.com/blog/?p=133</a><p>Just what I needed right now (I'm struggling to find the correct price for an app, was going to go with the market).<p>Something that also resonates with me is:<p>"I wish that I knew how difficult it is to acquire a customer, get them to pay for your product and believe it’s as magical as you think it is."<p>Edit: changed broken Wikipedia link.
These people seem to have been chosen because of(and their advice ordered by) their physical attractiveness rather than their actual entrepreneurial success.<p>Edit: OK, I kind of take it back. I started paying attention at #4 and stopped at #10.
> Don’t hire people that are getting a salary bump up by working with you<p>Anyone else find that piece of advice a bit odd? Wouldn't someone like that be more of an asset since they were (ostensibly) getting paid closer to their worth than before, especially if they actually fit your culture?
My takeaway (Cliff's Notes):<p>Customer: build from distribution backwards / know your customers / build small or incomplete first in order to test demand<p>Self: running a company is an emotional roller-coaster, be prepared mentally, schedule the important stuff, your team is extremely important<p>Company: build necessary metrics from day one, price test / analyze, iterate quickly, learn always
What I liked most about this post: not so much the answers, but the fact that the answers were all so different...further emphasizing that there rarely is <i>one right answer</i>, but many possibilities and that you have to find your own.<p>Great read. Thank you, OP.
it seems that the recurring theme is "You can loose so much time worrying about things that don’t even matter" - Gautam<p>"start saying NO to things that would take me away from what really needed my attention" - Renee<p>"is the question I am agonizing over right now likely to be the thing I will agonize over four years from now? The answer is usually no." - Bo<p>The main idea I got from this is to re-evaluate the things you are doing every day and prioritize the tasks that are absolutely essential to the startup.
This link seems to be working:<p><a href="http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-from-21-entrepreneurs" rel="nofollow">http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-from-21-entre...</a>
This has happened to me often enough lately that I really wish someone would implement peer-to-peer hosting in a form that will replace the way the current internet works.