Use Omnigraffle for prototyping. In this day and age, people know how websites look and behave. If you're talking to money people that don't understand these, then run away quick.

This is the route that Matt mentions and I do think that I will end up following his path. Although I am hoping that the launch will be successful and that this will automatically attract some quality technical co-founders, I don't expect this fairy tale to come true. What I am hoping for is that having a completed prototype and a bit of market response etc will make it much easier to actually reach out to people who could become co-founders. In the meanwhile I can continue to build the project using my mercenaries.

For investors, who should generally be accredited, convincing them to invest some small portion of their net worth, or in the case of a VC, a couple of dollars that he was planning to invest anyway, seems like a much lower hurdle than convincing a colleague to quit his guaranteed income to go without income for a period of time. He is giving you 100% of his capital because that is what he has to offer.

Huge risk for people.

Convincing people to join your company – people would have to be nuts to take on such risk – is an incredibly good mechanism for convincing an investor that an idea has merit because the people that joined the idea originator took far bigger risks than the investors will ever take.

Hence, “finding a co-founder” after the idea is originated is incredibly hard. People participating in the act of creation have part of the buy-in necessary to actually do something. People found after the fact are being “sold” the idea. This is harder to do.

Better to befriend engineers and then come up with the idea than come up with an idea and then look for a co-founder.

(Even this comment is poorly written. No wonder I haven't cranked out that blog post yet. Excuse the low quality of the comment, but there is a nugget of something here.)

I think you make some very good points about what it takes to make the process you went through survivable.

I think in combination with my other post it would tell both sides of the story very well and serve my original intention of keeping people out of an uncontrolled death-spiral.

You up for it? You could post on your blog and I could cross post here as a guest post.

I agree that the only thing that matters is that you “make progress, build the team, and get customers,” to an extent.

But suppose you ultimately don't get customers? Suppose you overpay to build something no one else will work on? That's a far too common story.

And when those folks stall-spin, they hit the ground hard and can't recover, primarily because they don't know how.

Matt, I think you have all the right instincts about what to do and when to do it, but so many don't. All I am saying is if you want to weather the storm, most people will have a better time with a strong technical co-founder as part of their team — which might even be a team of one to start with.

Just because you survived your own stall-spin doesn't make it ideal.

However, you did learn from it and are sticking with entrepreneurship. Too many go through the same experience and get turned off — never to start a business again.

I think if we want to make entrepreneurship a cultural norm, we need to focus a lot more on relationship-building. Ultimately that will mean less severe stalls and more people being successful at it. Right now it's just something people survive.

I guess the big thing i've seen non-technical people miss that you nailed is the importance of cultivating long term relationships. No one wants to be the hired help in a startup––they want to feel ownership, and I definitely agree that lots of people miss out on this and think they can get away with not sharing.

Who cares if you throw the prototype out? Who cares if you switch from PHP to Rails? That's all sunk costs. The only thing that matters is that you make progress, build the team and get customers.

Case in point: SpeakerText. My original co-founder built the site in PHP and the app in Flash. The product kind of sucked, but there were some cool features, it got the idea across and we used it to get some good press. He ultimately wasn't ready to commit and we did the whole stall spin thing you describe (although we parted ways amicably and he still helps out from time to time). Burned through some cash, our angel round imploded, etc.

HOWEVER, I was able to leverage that initial momentum and press to build relationships with the top angel investors in the world and ultimately find long term technical co-founders. The three of us have been living together for the last two months and have rebuilt both the site and the app from scratch, now using real hardcore technology that we built ourselves. And it is going to be awesome.

Was it a perfectly optimal upward trajectory? No. But if I didn't try it, I don't think we would have ever gotten off the ground.