infogaufire

Assuming you are US based and raised angel round at $5mil post money valuation. First employee (talented or experienced or super smart) for marketing will get a salary of $110K average in the market for Director of Marketing role. So, you will have to make sure that

X + Y/4 = $100-$125K/per annum and some more equity for being an early employee

where X is a fixed salary and Y is equity with 4 years vesting and 1 year cliff. If you pay him 80K salary, give him around 2-4% equity. And may be 1% equity as options for staying more than 2 years in company.

What about Makemytrip, Naukri/Infoedge, Inmobi or Slideshare?

When you say "nicely designed handmade website", what does handmade means here? What about other billion websites including bootstrap, were they machine made or something? Please clear the confusion. Thanks.

Learn programming to make a prototype. I recently hired a girl programmer who learnt programming by herself in just 10 weeks and built really good product while learning programming.

I actually managed that myself for sometime. Accounting can easily be managed if you can dedicate just one night on building a simple app for that with even a bad UI. All you have to do is: 1. Create a table Money with id, name, money, credit/debit (1 or 0), date&time 2. Create a form to enter these values

Below the form, just print values from database order by date&time

This simple thing will take you very long - believe me. Its that easy.

For marketing @ very early stage, you just have to be a hustler. This is something what I do whenever I float some random new project (just posted this comment on HN) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5836395

1. Go to google keyword suggestion tool and check how many people are searching for something you are building. Say, you are building Employee Evaluation Tool - close to 74K searchers are made every month in US and 135K globally. Competition is medium, so there is still some space for new player. So, yes there is some demand for problem I m trying to solve.

2. List down top 10 blog post links which talk about Problem your product will solve and post comment on all those blogs in 3-4 lines : first two lines about the post, next two about your project & link. So, you will start getting some traffic atleast say 20-30 users daily from all those 10 blogs combined.

3. Start creating good relations with people who have given you these emails. Tell them something like : "Hi, Thanks for giving me you email. I am building this product where you will be able to choose pre-made Employ Evaluation forms or will be able to edit them too. What more do you think you will need to solve your problem of Employee evaluation. Thanks."

So, with in 2-3 weeks, you will have really good idea if this thing gonna work or not.

@sharmag88

I have been a single founder 2 times (one of the companies got sold and other one is doing good) and 2 times with co-founders. And I personally find starting up a single founder.

You mentioned you have good ideas more than 2 times i guess, you will have to take that thing out of your mind. When you are onto something, burn rest of the ideas for atleast 6 months.

If you can't find co-founder, surround yourself with team members, start with hiring people remotely china,india,bangladesh.

Build prototype, no full fledged product. Try to fail fast if things doesn't pick after few months to save some time and fatigue. By prototype I mean, that one feature that separates you from others.

Learn to delegate work. As a programmer first, founder second - I used to micro manage things which gave me really bad time with my first startup. But as you start delegating work to your remote workers / employees, you will start feeling better.

I would advice you to build something with atleast some business model. Its tough to create instagrams or tumblrs of the world.

Hope this helps.

Whenever lightening strikes you with a new idea. Same lightening hits 100 others in different parts of the world with same idea #realstory #universalfact

If I feel this is not my bestest ever idea and I can come up with better ideas in future, I will sell it for sure. Have done it twice before, not with google although, for the same reason.

Any music (beats are must), anywhere (bed or desk or couch), Mac Air, sitting, preferably in company of other coders(& friends). And I am a big time night person 11pm to 4am works the best for me.

Great. Thanks alot, this is very useful.

Awesome. Just to make this more useful for me & other readers who have been doing web developing with php/python/ruby etc, what will be your advice regarding how to get started with iOS development to build our first working app?

Something similar to http://croak.it. Anyways congrats on your first iOS app. How long did it take you to build this?

Neither you are crazy nor you are the only with such feelings. I am a 3x entrepreneur, have sold 2 companies and 25 years old. I am working for the acquirer of my last company for last 14 months and I am already tired of writing code for someone else. I am all set to leave my six figure salary and keep hacking & building products that inner me wants to build. Believe me, getting a job at the same pay scale will never be a problem for you. Go ahead and start working on your own ideas full time.

1. I searched for journalists who have written about topics my startup was related to and shared my story and gave them sneak peek into beta version. That gave me some great visibility via blogs like thenextweb and mashable.

2. I made sure that I use write set of words and language to provoke few early users to share my beta website with their network - It was all about wordings.

3. The tweets and facebook messages that went out had similarly provoking wordings that made posts viral.

4. I launched beta version with very basic feature but started rolling out new things every 48-72 hours.

5. I used a real bad logo initially, people made fun of that logo on twitter - i used that as an opportunity to ask for help from twitter world - got 19 logo designs (some from designers at big ad agency, TV network) in my inbox in 24 hours or so.

6. I was super super quick in support - people were wow'ed by the speed at which me and my small team replied to support mails.

1 month later, we were @ 100K users and got acquired in 4th month of launch.

Hope this helps.