There is no formula for that. Read as you need to. Have your mentor(s) suggest books that are specific to your needs. A good starting point might be one relevant book per month to start. There are also those book summary services that can give you the themes of the books in 5 minutes of reading. Subscribe to that and then you can get the full versions of the books you connect with best.

Personal referrals or LinkedIn

I think that the answer is dependent on the level of technical talent that is already on-board. If you have an engineering focused squad, you can get away with rudimentary understanding. To your description a "non-technical CEO" is just that. Of course, whenever there is a gap in the team, it is generally the CEO's job to wear different types of hats as the weather changes. One of those hats may be a hacker.

Agree with Chris (Above). Here's my 1-2-3. 1. A warm intro is brilliant - especially from a company they funded before OR missed out on that did darn well. 2. Keep answers short, but loaded to enlist questioning from them. This creates a discussion rather than a bombardment. Ask them questions and let them discover the answers about your product by leading them in. 3. Don't pitch a VC - pitch a partner who understands the opportunity and has taken a stake in something similar or ancillary.

Have a product that users / customer are using and continue to use. The goal is to derisk the opportunity for investors and the biggest risk is that you'll build something that nobody wants. Once you have that, then try and find a big enough market and opportunity that justifies a venture investments (many startups don't). And finally, once you do those 2 things - spend time building a list of investors near you, or that have invested in companies near you, then network your way via the entrepreneurs that raised money from those investors to get introductions. Nothings guaranteed but those things will definitely help the probability of you closing a seed round.

Mashable is the best blog a tech CEO should connect with. There are literally hundreds of books to sort through and you need to find books specific to what you are doing and what you will connect with.

Usually Programmers are only slow when they don't know how to solve a particular problem. So they will spend a lot of time researching and a lot of trial & errors to solve a problem. It is important that before you engage a programmer on a project, you break down the entire project into simple, easy to understand modules. Let him give you an estimate of how many hours he will require to complete each of the modules. Example: a typical site will have a login module, registration, My account, profile etc. So let him estimate how much he will require to do the login. You can go even detail here. (e.g. how much extra time if you were to implement Facebook/Twitter Login?). Once he start developing, track his progress closely and make sure he is following his given timeline. If he goes over his budgeted time on a module, talk with him and see what went wrong. It is often seen that they may be wasting their time on something very insignificant that you may have asked him to implement, but you can totally go by without it too. So by understanding what is taking longer time, you will be able to prioritise things better. You definitely need some tools to get this done. Google Spreadsheet or Excel works just fine. But if you don't mind spending a few bucks there are many agile project management tools that you might look into. Here is a list, google them all and sign up for trials: * AgileZen * Agile Bench * Assembla * AssiTrack * Blossom * Basecamp * Breeze * DoneDone * Eidos * Fogbugz * GreenHopper * Jugggla * Kanbanpad * Pivotal Tracker Or the reason why he is slow can be purely non-technical. Sometime your developer may don't share the same level of enthusiasm as you about the idea that you are working on. They often don't often see the "bigger picture" (since you don't share everything with them explicitly). If you can somehow get them excited about what he is a part of, it will work like a drug :) He will work day and night without questioning you. But you need to work equally as hard as him. The moment he sees that you are the boss and he is just the guy doing work for you -- his mentality will shift from being part of something to being the low paid developer. Ultimately its all about motivation and making him a part of your venture. After all he deserves it, if he is really playing a crucial role in the entire development.

First of all, get an NDA in place. Then discuss with the potential partner what type of resources they can provide you to assist with time to market and after launch. From resources to operations to marketing, etc; what is the overall sense of the partnership.

I've been using perfectaudience.com and found great success. It's very easy to use and the results have consistently been above average. It's Facebook specific but where are most people spending their time? Facebook.

At ShopLocket, we deal with a lot of crowdfunding alumni like InteraXon, Nomiku and PopSLATE (among others). Through talking with them and through other hardware entrepreneurs in our Blueprint series (www.shoplocket.com/blueprint), we've uncovered a lot of great tips and tricks that I haven't seen anywhere else. Here are just a few: - Send individual emails to your mailing list when announcing your campaign rather than a generic mass blast. At least for people you're close with. It greatly increases the chance that they will act. - Send calendar invites out to friends to remind them when the campaign starts. - Have a website during the campaign to look more professional. Maybe even setup an AngelList profile, a lot of investors now use Kickstarter as a source for leads. - Use virtual assistants from services like ODesk to help you with some of the grunt work launching your campaign. Like media list creation and email drafting. - Be ready to launch pre-orders immediately after the campaign to keep up momentum. Just collecting email addresses rarely converts to sales months later. - Send updates more than you think you should. It keeps everyone in the loop and also increases the likelihood that you get shared. Here are some stats on the collelation between updates and amount raised from Indiegogo > http://support.indiegogo.com/entries/20491883-how-to-send-campaign-updates - Shipping can be very expensive. A cool hack is to ship pallets to Amazon overseas in order to save on international shipping These are just a few tips, we're actually in the midst of writing a full guide. If you have any additional questions feel free to email me at katherine@shoplocket.com or ping me on Clarity!

There is NO simple answer for this. Is the app a game? Is it a utility? Is it a social app? All apps have different advertising/launch strategies. On a broad level, Facebook's in-stream mobile app ads have proven to be very effective for conversions so I would probably start there. The key is to concentrate your efforts in the first 3-4 days of launch for advertising so you can drive up downloads and app reviews in a short period to (hopefully) be recognized in the "new and notable" and "what's hot" categories in the AppStore. Doing that effectively elongates your launch by getting in front of more people and increasing downloads.

Not totally clear on what you are asking, but if the questions is; does giving out a referral code to an existing user in hopes that they would refer another work? My experience (largely in B2B software) is not all that well, at least not without some sort of incentive. Even if your user is super satisfied with the product/service you are providing, simply giving them a code to give another person doesn't necessarily drive them to make the handoff. Now, two things. First, if you either incentivize the existing user with say a discount on his next bill or a free goodie, then he'll be more likely to do it... Even better, if you do that, plus give the referred user some kind of benefit, like a discount on his first bill, free trial or other goody, then it can work rather well. Second, all that said, know that referrals in general are gold. You should test and do whatever you can to get referrals. Generally @Leads360 we found that providing really high quality customer service (more so than even the best product) lead to referrals. To that point, our sales people worked in tandem with customer service in this way. Whenever a CS person realized they gave a great customer experience they would let the sales person know and they would then reach out to that customer while still warm from the nice touch and simply ASK for a referral. I was always surprised when we could get referrals simply by asking. I like to stick with 1 referral at a time, just ask for 1 person to be email connected with, don't overwhelm them with the statement "hey, can you refer your friends and colleagues to us", be specific. Something like "I see on LinkedIn you're connected with John B from ACME corp, I'd really like to speak with him about our product, would be willing to make an introduction for me".

One of the biggest things I do is "time chunk". Time chunking – and fine tuning the practice – allows me to work with optimum productivity. It’s worth trying in some form or another because it removes a decision from the process of doing: what to do and when to do it. Another set of practices I put into play are outlined in my manifesto: http://productivityist.com/blog/the-way-of-the-productivityist-a-manifesto I talk about a lot of other strategies over at my website, and in my e-book "The Productivityist Workbook".

The best way is to lean how to ask great questions and to physically spend time with your users watching them work. I don't have all the killer questions, but my favourite to help understand product roadmap opportunities is "What do you do 3 minutes before, and after you use our product?". That helps me understand where the opportunity lies to build a solid solution end-to-end. Also, finding a set of users that feel comfortable having you hangout and work with them, taking notes and asking questions is invaluable. Just to understand their environment, the way they organize their work, and how they might communicate around the problems your solution is/could help with is incredible. Every time I'm at an event and someone ask me what I do, I always ask them if I can "show them" and if they say yes, I have them find / download / signup and explore our app. Then I ask them questions about how they might see someone using it, who they think might be the best customer, etc. It's not about not knowing, it's about continuously learning and testing different perspectives. As for tools I use: www.usertesting.com / especially new mobile tests!

If you're going to offer your services for free then try to take on an internship with a company that specializes in what you do. This way you can add that experience to your resume.

I agree with Dan. It's always better to avoid outside investors. If you MUST get investment, make it count and be prepared to show exactly how you will make money and how the investor will be repaid.

InfoUSA.com has the most thorough and reliable database of consumer information available. You can drill in further by segmenting demographic, psychographic and geographic variables. Always use any purchased lists with caution to make sure you adhere to the Do Not Call list. Further information can be found at: http://www.the-dma.org/government/donotcalllists.shtml

I'm a fan of - MySQL - Resque - Ruby/Rails - jQuery - Backbone - Bootstrap - Heroku

Listing syndication is done via an IDX. You can search for this term and find lots of discussion about the matter, much of it controversial. The source of the listings is through the local or regional MLS. This is a highly competitive market with well capitalized models competing for buyer attention.

Easy... Contact companies you would want to work for and offer to intern or work for free for a few days/week under someone with that experience. Soak in the info. Help them in other areas. Ask a lot of questions as if you are completely new to the field.

There are very few good sources to find specific groups of sites that accept guest blogs. My advice is to find blogs you like and respect and email them to see if they accept guest blogs. For example, my site at Magolnick.com sees a few thousand visitors per day and I'm always looking for good marketing content.

Set parameters based on life, not work. For example, commit to never miss a child's event or date lunch/dinner. Leave work at work. Take vacations without your smartphone, iPad and computer (something I struggle with!).

Good to Great (Collins) Getting Naked (Lencioni) Managing Humans (Lopp) One Minute Manager (Blanchard) Crucial Conversations (Patterson)

When it comes to raising money you must remember that risk is a perception. Your job is to drain the risk! Below is a link to a resource I provide my investors. The 50 questions are specific to product design/development but the 15 categories are questions that apply to any industry. If you can answer these questions about your deal you will have gone a long way to "drain the risk" for your investors and get funded. http://www.jaredjoyce.com/freetreats/50questions.pdf Once you have answered the questions for your deal schedule a call with me and I can help you integrate the answers into your investor pitch.

You avoid it. How? By having a clear plan and having decided ahead of time what's important. Many entrepreneurs, especially those without a lot of experience at it, confuse hyper-activity with progress. Don't do that. Drive your own activities, gauge each thing you do against it's impact on making the future you want happen - and most importantly, say No a lot. Stay focused on impact and remember that all urgent things aren't actually important things.