If you have the attention of people now, let them play with the Alpha version now so you can learn truth fast about how others perceive the problem, and your hypothesis that your app has the ability to solve it.

Also, don't sweat all of the negative posts. It is way too easy to pick holes in the work of others, especially at an early stage.

Do however look for the common themes commenters dislike, as your next code/design/pr effort can address these.

Great post. Many great things can be achieved with a short burst of energy/focus, but these things are often temporary and unsustainable, which is why the Man Up approach gets trumped by the I Will Continue To Do Better approach once real life kicks in.

Made with: node.js, express.js, pusher, mongodb and hosted on Nodester

The skills that gets you into business (programming for example) are not the ones that will make you successful at business (everything else).

So perhaps the question shouldn't be about what does a non-programmer bring to a small team, but rather what do you as current co-founders not personally bring to your own business?

If building a scalable money making app/service/product/thing is what you want to do, then customer development is going to be just as important as product development, and connecting the dots between customers/users and your idea/features cannot be written with code alone.

Either the existing co-founders will need to share an equal level of interest/skill/time for the other parts of the equation (design/ux/sales/marketing/support/bizdev/funding/everything else), or you will need to acquire these skills via payroll or equity.

Knowing in which areas you suck will help this process a lot, and this only comes with giving something a go yourself.

Once you know your weaknesses you will be in a good position to assess what skills/experience a new co-founder will need to have to balance things out.

You don't have to tweet the decision/outcome, but if you do the tweet is an @reply to the person chosen for the task, not a public tweet.

We start the day with a twurn to see who makes coffee for the rest of the team. We twurn again for the same reason after lunch, and again around 4pm.

We made it just for fun, but it gets used every single day without fail.

The best part is that if you lose 3 times in a row, you get a free pass the next time you lose against the same group.

shouldn't that be 'if you lose 3 twimes in a row'?

I'm sure the tree that was cut down in the first place would be smiling at the demise of paper-based books :]

The Four Steps to the Epiphany by steve Blank is pretty good at guiding you through the customer development process.

Upvoted. I've just finished reading it, and even if you find fault with the process he builds in it, it gives a very good perspective on the busywork and cargo cult rituals that sink a lot of businesses. He's also got a damn good blog (http://www.steveblank.com) which gets links here fairly regularly :-)