What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup?<p>My top 3:<p>1. How do I get money?<p>2. How do I get a good deal?<p>3. How do I recruit great people?<p>I'll collect the responses and post the results here on news.yc.<p>- Nivi from Venture Hacks, <a href="http://venturehacks.com">http://venturehacks.com</a>
It's all about the story: <p>1) Who is my audience? <p>2) What will I help them do that is better than what they have to do now? <p>3) How am I going to build it?
1) how do I get 1 million + users in 18 months?<p>2) how do I manage 1 million + users with the smallest team possible?<p>3) how do I turn 1 million users into at least 10 million dollars?<p>When I think of startups I'd like to be, I think of Winamp, hotornot.com, del.icio.us, reddit. These are companies that won big with only 1-5 people. I've been involved with startups that focused on getting a good series-A, hiring 20-30 people, then fucked around for 3 years and vanished off the face of the earth.<p>At this point, i think a better approach is to stay small and cash out for $10M in 18 months, rather than try to get big with an increasingly diminishing chance of success.<p>Of course if you're sure you've got a Google or YouTube, the "traditional" silicon valley venture-backed startup isn't a bad way to go. However it is kind of a bummer when you sell your thing for $1.4 billion and 600 million of it goes right to your investors... Would rather be Justin Frankel than Chad Hurley.
After developing the idea, researching the market and such:<p>1. What's my business model?
2. How do I get to prototype/alpha/demo?
3. What investors are interested in this stage, industry and business model?