This is a good one. I'd recommend reading The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. It provides a lot of insight into how companies get so invested into what they've built that they have a tough time identifying if/when to adapt to emerging technologies, behaviors, and helps identify how...
Hiring is fine if you can afford the cash flow outlay now. Remember, no one will ever care as much about your business as you do. At this stage, a combination of base plus commission is likely to work best. You want that base to be just not quite enough for the hire to pay their monthly bills; ...
I've used the Foursquare API for a lot of different kinds of applications, both web and mobile. In my opinion you should not store any venue information in your application for a couple of reasons. First, I think the terms and conditions you agreed to when signing up for an API key prohibit yo...
Retention - if you build something people want/use AND come back and use often, then you can usually figure out a business model to make it work (if there's a big enough market).
I don't think I would add anything to Sean's pyramid but I do have my own approach to things that essentially breaks it down a bit more to a granular approach. 1. Find users who've had success If you're lucky to have 100-1000 users, I'm hoping you can identify 5-20 of them that love your produc...
Think big. Start small. You should always think of the bigger picture (i.e. Facebook for everyone in the world), because you want to make sure that you enable yourself to grow towards that point. Using Steve Jobs' analogy, it's about anticipating where the dots will be. Or as Wayne Gretzky puts ...