For Ruby and jQuery based development of a demo for a new consumer web idea, would you recommend hiring a developer and doing it in-house or working with an agile development shop like Pivotal Labs?

I always value in-house over outsourced provided you can find quality people. In any software project: “The only thing constant is change and speed is key”.

When you outsource you inevitably put yourself on someone else’s schedule.

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If you were in your early 20's and had the option to go back to school to learn programming from scratch, or start outsourcing/hiring programmers right away, which option w...

Answered by Dan Martell – Founder & Investor.

Go buy a book on programming (Ruby, Python, Php) and do both in parallele. You don't need to go to school to learn to code - most of the programming I learned was from boo... (more)

I am in the idea stage for a startup and lost my technical founder within a week of being ready to pitch to seed stage investors. Would you recommend finding another techni...

Answered by Mark MacLeod – Partner, Real Ventures

For me anyway, a tech co-founder is super key. I would wait. (more)

How can someone who has no experience in social marketing get into it? Like to learn it or intern somewhere?

Answered by Maggie Fox – Founder, Social Media Group

Find the people who are doing it the best or working with clients you would like to work with. Find a way to demonstrate your awesomeness and value to them, ask for an inte... (more)

Who would you recommend startups get sound pricing guidance from? So many startups have undervalued their solutions out the gate and even more seem to be following their l...

Answered by Dan Martell – Founder & Investor.

There's no one person that stands out. I like to run test against users and validate the pricing yield. Some do this with surveys, other (like me) do it in app using diff... (more)

As a new bootstrapped web startup, do you have any recommendations on where to find help marketing? We're not ready to bring someone on full time but need help getting the ...

Answered by Garry Tan

You should do it yourself. Basically everything you can do should be in a stack ranked list ordered by likelihood to cause you to succeed. If you have money, you can hire o... (more)

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