What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup?

My top 3:

1. How do I get money?

2. How do I get a good deal?

3. How do I recruit great people?

I'll collect the responses and post the results here on news.yc.

- Nivi from Venture Hacks, http://venturehacks.com

1) how do I get 1 million + users in 18 months?

2) how do I manage 1 million + users with the smallest team possible?

3) how do I turn 1 million users into at least 10 million dollars?

When I think of startups I'd like to be, I think of Winamp, hotornot.com, del.icio.us, reddit. These are companies that won big with only 1-5 people. I've been involved with startups that focused on getting a good series-A, hiring 20-30 people, then fucked around for 3 years and vanished off the face of the earth.

At this point, i think a better approach is to stay small and cash out for $10M in 18 months, rather than try to get big with an increasingly diminishing chance of success.

Of course if you're sure you've got a Google or YouTube, the "traditional" silicon valley venture-backed startup isn't a bad way to go. However it is kind of a bummer when you sell your thing for $1.4 billion and 600 million of it goes right to your investors... Would rather be Justin Frankel than Chad Hurley.

It's all about the story:

1) Who is my audience?

2) What will I help them do that is better than what they have to do now?

3) How am I going to build it?

After developing the idea, researching the market and such:

1. What's my business model? 2. How do I get to prototype/alpha/demo? 3. What investors are interested in this stage, industry and business model?

1) Whats my business model going to be?

2) Whats my business model going to be?

3) Where am I going to get a cofounder?

1. Where did I put the doritos?

2. Man, these doritos are good.

3. Wow, someone just handed me a lot of money.

1. Do people want this? 2. Are you ridiculously passionate about the idea? 3. Are you willing to suffer deeply to make it successful?

1. Would I have fun working on it? 2. Would people use it? 3. What's been done and how do I make it better?