How I Found a Co-Founder, Built a Prototype, and Raised $5M in Less Than 4 Weeks

This is an outstanding article. The idea of a core group containing people genuinely interested in all members' success is absolutely compulsory to launch a great product. The whole thing is true honesty and openness; you have to be able to completely trust, on many levels, the people in your group.<p>My group contains friends I've known since college, from a variety of unrelated majors. We all work on different projects, but we keep in constant contact and offer to each other the brutal honesty that members of our respective teams could not otherwise offer. Additionally, we use each of our unique experiences to identify new problems, and new areas that might be worth pursuing. It's an incredible feeling.<p>Actually, for a long time, I've been thinking about creating a site that facilitates pairing people together for this purpose. I've been throwing around a few ideas for it, and have a pretty decent idea churning in the back of my mind. How interested would you guys be in a site like okcupid for entrepreneurs?

I thought for sure this was a joke headline from DanielBMarkham's linkbait generator: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112277" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112277</a>

I find having core peer groups (I like to call them "cronies" just for kicks) to be invaluable. We share with each other information about our businesses and challenges we face that we wouldn't share with others. We check in with one another and hold each other accountable.<p>I like to think of it as like being investors in each other's companies, but with no money exchanging hands, and no complicated term sheets. Each success for one of us results in more success for all of us.

So if you add in the time it took to find your Core Peer Group who could make all that happen in four weeks, how long did it really take you?

I have found this exact thing to be true. I launched my first (fulltime) startup this past summer, and the insight of my "core group" was simply brilliant. I ended up asking 3 of them to join my board, and they have not only helped me avoid mistakes, but steered me into a profitable direction as well.<p>Great article Brian, the breadth of this article is fantastic.

What the author didn't dig into was the selection of core groups, and how we choose a group that best serves us as individuals and that we can best contribute to.<p>How does one move between core groups, how many can you be an active member of at once?

Key sentence FTA: <i>I had previously started a few companies with angel funding and a couple small exits, but certainly nothing of scale.</i><p>He didn't raise $5M in 4 weeks, it took years of laying the groundwork.

Great article on things you would/should generally do as an entrepreneur, but Id have actually seen bit more of a break down (daily perhaps) on actually work done towards the particular app/product.