Your not going to want to hear this, but there are really no options. Your best bet is to raise from friends and family. Maybe, maybe you could get lucky and raise from a government grand or biz plan contest, but still unlikely. Get something built, get users, then the funding should come (well at least a little easier.)
wasn't there something kiva-like for startups? but I second the friends & family suggestion. If all you need is a throwaway prototype / demo it is amazing what you can get done for very little money & a little ingenuity these days
I wanted to write about going after the mainstream press. Why just focus on bloggers?
1. Do not use a PR firm. If you are on HN you are probably a startup with out funding. They will charge you an arm and a leg. You can do better on your own. Be passionate about your product - people will respond more to that, then anything else.
2. Make your product sexy. Sexy sells. A new way of using mobile phones is more interesting than a new DB model. If it is not an inherently sexy product, make sure it looks professional. People want to write about companies that 'feel' professional.
3. Come up with a story. "we are two guys who sold baseballs for 3 years and worked on this in our spare time." "the recession hit, and we both lost our jobs, and this was the result."
4. Reach out to reporters. Every newspaper/magazine/tv news show now lists reporters emails. Reach out to them; tell your story. Find them, and buy them a drink. They are often young and looking for cool stories.
5. Network your face off. Go to places where new startups launch, and launch there. Meet everyone. Get business cards. Tell people you are looking for press contacts. You should be doing this stuff anyway.
6. Use http://www.helpareporter.com/ Journalists need stories to write about. They need new (sexy) material. Craft your story to fit theirs - don't lie, but if you started in a recession and they are talking about new businesses in the recession, make your story fit.
7. Leverage your friends in PR / make friends with people in PR. If you are based in a major city, if you went to college, if you know anyone in marketing - you have a friend or friend of a friend in PR. Leverage them to write Press Releases (which I don't think work in the beginning) and to send you out the emails they get looking for stories.
8. Make an awesome product - at the end of the day, if your product sucks, nothing else you do will matter. No one will write anything about it (unless your FB)
Ok, just a bunch of quick thoughts from a guy who has had a little luck with this.
I feel like everyone thinks 'man you need an advisory board to be considered real.' Most meetings with anyone investing in you they ask 'who is on your board.' Even with all that being said, I just don't see the value. Most people will help you along your way because they care about what you are doing. The ones that want something from you in return, I would stay away from anyway. Either way, like hwijaya said, its all up to you.
Yes - There is a combination of technology, new businesses, entrepreneurship, and new trends in society. There's also some development challenges, and recognizing a new market.
I'll agree with a previous poster - slashdot, digg, have pretty much dropped off my reading habits - HN, NYT, and techcrunch (and sporadically groklaw and salon.com) are now my web distractions. Not every article can be about erlang.
I don't know: HN is rapidly replacing my feed reader; and I think the news is interesting in its own right (may not have anything to do with "hacking", but still).
I think that there are reasons that this article should be here, but "but still" is a terrible one. That's the kind of attitude that causes sites to decline in quality like Digg and Reddit. Criteria have to be rigidly enforced or things will go to shit.
Things go to shit when criteria are rigidly enforced. You can't define 'hacking' or 'entrepeneurship' and any set of criteria attempting to do so will require liberal interpretation to allow everything of interest. The result is necessarily that some stuff is not of interest. The only way to be sure everything is of interest, is by not allowing anything.
The shittiness of a social news site has nothing to do with the any sort of enforcement or criteria for a topic, or even having a topic at all. Rather, things go to shit on a social news site when the community is composed of people who can't (roughly) agree on what they like to read.
To regurgitate an old adage I heard from a Dungeon Master: "It's not the game that's fun, it's the players." We're here to share links and talk about stuff, not to "post" and "comment", blind and deaf, into the void. As long as we all like one another, the site is good. When we attract a group of people we don't like as much, and those people attract people we don't like at all, then the site will suck, because those people won't be sharing and talking about the same things we want to share and talk about.
Struck a nerve, all I was saying is that this article is not really interesting compared to what normally makes the front page of HN. I think the fact it has to do with Marijuana made people just up-vote it. If you actually read the article, it is the equivalent of two dudes talking about opening a bake shop.
If you were an east coast startup (or really from outside California) I could see the value, but if you are a startup in the Valley, it does not seem to really make sense. If you can't hustle and make the right connections, then what you are working on probably is not headed in the right direction.
How about somebody build it and register the domain name hnfaq.com. We can just post the link to it every time someone asks a common question. The hnfaq.com site would list the commonly asked questions, and give links to threads addressing the topic.
(I assume PG is not interested in this, otherwise it would exist already.)
