DividesByZero

I would suggest it's not just a matter of willpower. You should be in a material position to execute effectively - having to start worrying about how you'll feed your family, or pay your rent is a massive distraction.

Build up a buffer so you won't have to worry about it, at least in the beginning.

If you want to really do a start-up, quit your job. If you can't or won't quit your job, it is not yet time for you to do a start-up.

I quit my job with six months in savings to start my company. It took us almost 8 months to get somewhere - we filled the gap with just a little web design work on the side. I have never regretted leaving my job.

If you only have 20 people to reach out to, you don't need much structure in how you go about doing it. Your goal should be to make those meetings happen at all.

Ask them for advice around the thing you are working on. Your goal at this stage should be to find 10 users who love your product.

Exactly. But those services are typically provided to entire families by BigCo - padded margins sound like this is a space where a cost-focused company could stand to make quite a bit of money.

I don't think this makes economic sense. Equity in startups who don't have enough cash on hand to pay rent is likely to be more risky than equity in those who do.

Giving away equity for rent at an early stage doesn't make sense for founders either - making a mess of your cap table for office space is a poor decision when you could work from many other places for free, or remotely from home.

This sounds like a bad deal for both parties in the marketplace.

Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

The accusations of 'revisionism' show an underlying bias - in the former soviet union and much of Europe, this is has been the accepted historical perspective for some time.

Bad news for the educational game accelerator they just launched.

I don't recall LJ having anything like a 'search by mood'. I guess my memory might be hazy though.

When I saw this I was confused about why Facebook wanted to be more like LiveJournal. Is that a reflection on the userbase?

The best advice I ever got about how to hire people and fill gaps in your team is to do the job yourself first - this applies to everything, not just tech.

The advantages of this approach are enormous - it helps you understand what you're looking for, helps you evaluate candidates and helps you understand the needs of your own company better than anything else ever could. And you're no longer desperate - you can afford to wait until you've found the best person to work with. It means that when you do start talking to people, they will respect you more because you took the time and effort to work out exactly what it is they do and how valuable they are.

It might even turn out that you don't even need that person, that the company is doing just fine because you worked out you can do it yourself more cost effectively than bringing on someone else.

Develop your skills so you can be the tech co-founder until you can get someone better than you.