Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it).<p>Two elaborations:<p>1)  General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.<p>2)  His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and <i>then</i> starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good.  (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead."  That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing.  There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z."  I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the-business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)