Sean Murphy (SKMurphy)

This was somebody I know through the Lean Startup movement, Sean Murphy: https://www.skmurphy.com/ He's brilliant, and he started Bootstrappers Breakfast, so he's very comfortable with bootstrapping and solo founders. He asked so many good questions. I also recommend Tristan Kromer: http://www.tristankromer.com/ He's also great, and is more focused on larger startups and intrapreneurs.

I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Be very clear on who your customer is (who will pay for your product). If you want your friends or advisors to recommend prospects you are going to need to get very specific on characteristics (preferably three) of the kind of folks who will most benefit from your product and the key symptoms (the prospect's perception of a problem) that would indicate you can guarantee you can deliver one or more benefits in a very short amount of time (preferably two hours, hopefully no more than five days). It's often better lead off with a well thought out question someone can say yes or no to, where the yes means you may be able to help them. Follow up with one or two clarifying questions to make sure you can deliver a benefit by which point you should at least have them intrigued. Here is an example of a bad question: "do you want to save money on your hosting service?" It's not a pain question.For your application a potential pain question related to blogging (since I don't know anything about your application this is only by way of example) might be "Are you trying to write and publish more than four blog posts per day?" or "Are your blog posts average over a 1,000 words" Please note that both of these answers might also be inferred by analyzing the blogs directly, which is another way to get leads, determine some objective tests based on data you can develop about a prospect that would indicate your product might be very relevant to pain he is…

Inspiration is lumpy, so I've adopted the Fieldstone method [1] (articulated by the prolific Gerald Weinberg). In my implementation, I collect little thoughts (shower thoughts, observations, good turns of phrases, etc.) into a single continuous Google Doc. I revisit it often and guided by my current emotions and interests, try to coalesce like-ideas and rewrite them into a large idea. Some ideas eventually snowball into something substantial. Unless you're a columnist with a deadline (with innate talent driven by adrenalin), everybody knows how difficult it is to write an essay from scratch. However if you've been collecting ideas, and have been developing and coalescing and rewriting them over and over again (often for years), the essay almost writes itself. [1] https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/05/04/weinberg-on-writing-fieldston…

Terrible, disgusting stock photos. I swear I've seen a version of this somewhere with a numbered list instead of the gnarly images. [EDIT] Indeed: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2009/10/19/8-tips-for-evaluating-funding-… http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984711