Today I ended up writing a white-paper in which I collect links for early startup people.

Particularly, early, non-technical, startup people.

My standard operating procedure, next time I hear a pitch about some startup needing a technical co-founder for equity, is to send them to this whitepaper.

I’ve helped a lot of startups and small businesses launch products - sometimes even minimally viable products that only might cost a few thousand dollars in development time. I’d love to do even more of that in the future.

However, the current startup environment seems to contain a lot of people who think, “I’ll get some coder who will gladly develop my killer idea, for a cut of the millions of dollars we’ll make! Who could resist that!!!”

This whitepaper, I hope, serves an an education device: doing a startup doesn’t mean brainstorming all day (brainstorming about the app before noon, then taking a long lunch and brainstorming about which small island you should buy with all your startup IPO money until bed-time).

Startups, sadly, take actual work.

So, I present: Early Stage Startups: Advice for founding a startup