Great read.<p>I'm currently putting my startup together while being full time employed and it is quite hard.<p>If I would only give one advice to anyone looking to launch his/her idea is to do a market validation survey before anything else. You can do it for free and you'll be amaze to see what kind of result it can yelled if you ask the right people.<p>I did mine with google form and post the survey with a bit.ly link ( to track sources and geolocation ) in comments on blogs, forums, etc that I knew people that could be interested in my product frequent. in a week I got 100+ good quality answers to my survey. It took me 3 Hours top to create the survey and post it everywhere.<p>Finally, it can also help you to decide between features you have to cut for the release. In my case, I though a chat in my Web app + mobile wasn't that important and I could release it down the line. Well it seems my market though otherwise. My survey showed me 78% wanted a chat from the get go :)<p>Cheers,