overworkedasian

so right now, we are currently bootstrapping our startup and we'd like to raise a seed around to help us focus soley on the startup.

Raising money is a pain in the ass, that I get. Some friends have been asking how they can help us raise that seed round. While I would love their help with connecting me to people that are willing to seed us, is it right for us to give our friends equity (small amount) to help us raise a seed round?

The core team is focused on building the product and have been passing up consulting projects to focus 100% time/effort on this project. While I dont mind our friends wanting to connect us to people that have the cash to fund us, I dont know what the best way or best practice is to reward them (if their connection does indeed fund us in some way).

Part of me believes that my friends should be helping me regardless of what I give them while my co-founders think we should be compensating our friends for connecting us with potentially our seed investors.

Thoughts?

I'm about to open my app to a group of selected persons to take part in private alpha/beta testing, Should I require them to sign a NDA to particpate?

Whether you are trying to find technical co-founder or graphics design co-founder, is it still a major challenge today? I've been through all this 2 years ago, but things have changed over that time. Have any of the "find a cofounder" websites been useful to anyone or do they all suck and dont really solve the problem? Have meetups been helpful? Do you have a list of criteria that you look for in a co-founder? Are there any resources that worked for you? Any meetups?

Curious as to if finding the RIGHT cofounder is still a major sticking point for most people just starting out.

im currently throwing around an idea for a 'startup weekend' type of event. i've done several startup weekend events and I do have some gripes about it. while you do learn alot in those 48 hours of hacking/building a business model, it is very very stressful but rewarding. but i dont think it has to be that way all the time. was wondering if anyone has any complaints about these type of events that have been to in the past.

is it even possible to roll out your own private heroku-like hosting platform? with all these AWS problems, people that rely on Heroku have little choice but to run their own Rails server if they dont want to use Heroku.