just one final comment for those who keep harping about the lack of 'clarity' on the roadmap: _Yes, the roadmap is "vague" and lacks "clarity," but that's by design. A roadmap tells you what _you 're supposed to do next_, based on what _you 've already done_, to get to the promised land of awesome. Now contrast that with a spec, which is all about telling people what the code already does._ ~~~ pjscott I'd make two other points. First, sometimes there are good reasons for not publishing a detailed roadmap. Sometimes it's necessary to keep your options open; you don't want your competitors to learn all your strategies in advance. Sometimes it's about playing your cards close to your chest; knowing your plans makes it much easier for competitors to reverse-engineer them, if you have a successful product. Second, a lot of people would be horrified by the kind of documentation heavily inspired by the Agile Manifesto, but that has its benefits. You don't have to document all your plans at the same time. You can keep the plan open- ended and flexible for a long time, so that new ideas or technologies can be evaluated in context, rather than dismissed out of hand as "not core." You can go and play with these ideas on the cheap without worrying about making a complete fool of yourself when you actually build them. And you can have the best of both worlds, by developing the product incrementally as each new feature is requested. ------ zamio "You build it, they will come" isn't exactly the way to get VC funding. ~~~ tesseract There are two ways to look at that: 1) You are correct, but you wouldn't want them to do anything else. 2) Your job is to write code, and the businessmen who write the cheques shouldn't be having to worry about what it does. ~~~ karterk I think the point is more to do with the fact that people who make VC money have a huge appetite for things like "a scalable social network" or "a place to keep and share my recipes" that require lots of effort to build. Once you have built it, and shown that there's a market for it, the cash is in hand. You can't "get" VC money unless you have something that interests them and a very well thought through business plan. ------ petercooper It looks like a fantastic piece, although I had some reservations about the lack of a "sign up to have a go" link up top (which Google was thankfully smart enough to offer). However, I got no joy from the "how does it work" link. I hope it works, although it would've been nice to know a little something more at the start as to how it's supposed to work. ~~~ paulitex I'm just getting a "We're sorry, but this site is not available from your location." from Google searches for the site address. ------ michaelrbock I find myself in more than one group, including one just released in SF that I've been following for a year or more. They are all interesting to see what's going on, but I find it hard to say if my particular one will get traction. We have a mix of experienced and novice entrepreneurs, most with real-world knowledge. It's the mix that is the hardest problem. If the experienced people aren't willing to mentor the newer people, then you have no chance. Also, it seems that a lot of sites get no traction because they are solving problems that are not interesting to the general population. They get a lot of attention and then just disappear with little result. We have so many ideas that never have a chance of being successful because the people and circumstances are wrong. Everyone knows that the first version will never be successful but they are the ones making all the decisions. Any recommendations? ------ jcfrei I found the article very insightful and very much in line with my own experiences in setting up my startup. After some time of reading and understanding the article, I wrote down my thoughts: ------ grrrrprime I can't tell whether this is an april fool's joke or not, but otherwise it is very well written, and as I'm not a cofounder with much experience in marketing and a startup in a different market, I was intrigued by the following: _We asked our lead investor, Eric, how to fix this problem. Eric said it’s easy, just get rid of all the content. All right, where does that leave us?_ ------ jedberg I haven't been in a startup for nearly a decade now, but here's my question -- is this still really true? Is it still true that a great company will go from 0 users to 10k users? If not, how do you make that happen? ~~~ tptacek That's what PG has been saying for years. I think he would've been saying the same thing about BCC in 1995, although you'll be hard pressed to find any blogging software before the 2004 launch that did that. ~~~ jedberg But I am confused as to how you find your first 10k users. Sure, with BCC you could spam your friends but at a certain point it would have to become spam because there was no way to filter it so that you could keep them all. I do agree though that BCC found its 10k users really quickly. ~~~ cletus It's a common misconception that you need to spam friends to get users. Spammy. For BCC in particular you had a mailing list: the "list" button was there right from the beginning. For example, I got on the mailing list because I had tweeted about BCC. People were curious, too, which is why BCC launched in the first place. I can't speak for other sites, but I believe we took a similar approach to Facebook (sorry Mark, I never got to work with you but I've got to say it's a great name). Of course you also need great copywriting. Make sure your users are interested, articulate and know what they're going to get out of your product. It's why we got rid of some of our copy (eg. "Send Me a Friend" because most users have friends already) and changed the copy a lot over time. ~~~ hugh3 _It's a common misconception that you need to spam friends to get users._ Do you ever just give any old random person the phone number of your startup? ~~~ cletus I'm not aware of any startups that do this. Sure, it could happen (you can "get" a phone number through some means) but it's relatively rare that I meet someone, especially an educated and affluent one, who thinks "that's great but I've never heard of that and I don't really have an interest in that". It's not necessarily that he doesn't know your product but it's that he doesn't know that product. So far I've been very vocal about the fact that most new users come from friend referrals but from what I've seen this is no different than any other web app. ------ tom_ilsinszki A small aside: Why are we called the founders? Isn't the team supposed to be named the company? ~~~ philk Yeah, you wouldn't say "my dad bought a suit for me" would you? ~~~ laconian No. You'd say "I bought a suit for my dad", because it's not called "I" any more. :) ------ dstein I would also add that one of the biggest challenges for young startups is finding people who are interested in joining a project with no market. Even the biggest corporations spend a majority of their time hunting for new talent, because their new hires turn out to be the most productive part of the company, and so it's in the founders best interest to make the search for new members as efficient as possible. So don't limit your search for founding members to just the college campus and the social network your friends. The majority of your time should be spent developing a business plan and a pitch that will present your idea as a better alternative to the status quo. Once you've done that, your plan to find people with the right skills should be as broad and as expansive as your ideas. Remember, you're going to spend the rest of your life with these new cofounders and your ability to convince them that you're on to something big will directly correlate with their ability to be productive, motivated, and happy with the company. ~~~ pak There is another option: don't be a