Kristian has been involved in the upstart of a number of startups and one consulting company. He has 20 years of software development experience.
I have 20 years of software development experience, the recent years mostly javascript. In particular, I've worked with Node, Meteor, React, D3 and many smaller libraries and frameworks.
I have helped two startups successfully determine their initial positioning through customer development and focus. And perhaps more importantly, I have failed to do this for several startups before that, teaching me some hard lessons about how important it is. If you are failing to gain traction or have a sinking feeling that you might be developing a solution seeking a problem, I can help you on the right track.
This obviously depends highly on the domain/industry that you are in.
I can create a market place for, say, legal advice, tomorrow and have plenty of demand. I just need to make it a market place for free legal advice from top-lawyers. However, the supply will be hard to come by. Or I could get plenty of supply if I make it a marketplace for $1000/hr legal advice, no education required for the supplier. In which case the demand will be lacking. It can be quite tricky to find the equlibrium (indeed one might not exist) and I don't see how any generic advice could help. If you have managed this though, your problem should only be about reaching people. In that case, you either need to find the "home turf" of your suppliers or your buyers depending on which party you lack, go there and announce that people are looking to pay them money or people will help them solve their problem.
I guess this depends a lot on what sort of questions you are talking about. If it's life and love and "soft" things like that, intuition is probably better than any decision based on "data", what ever that would be. On the other hand, if you just have an intuition that you should set the price at $1,000 rather than $99, it might be worth at least exploring your own thinking. There is nothing wrong with having strong intuition and then looking for data to back it up with. It's a sound psychological foundation -- read Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error for a fascinating exploration of this idea. However, intuition can be wrong. "Following your gut" is sometimes praised as if gut feelings are some super natural source of knowledge. They are not. They should be guidelines, but you should still question them and be open to new realizations. Besides from conversations with people of different views, 5 whys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys) might be a useful tool for this.
If I was just starting out, I'd consider learning Meteor (https://www.meteor.com/). It's just entered version 1.0 and after working with it for a little less than a year I do have some issues with it but it still makes for a very solid framework that gets you up and running very fast. You would only need to learn Javascript, and you can slowly work your way towards nodejs from there (which Meteor is based on) if you want to, or you could get the basics down and focus on learning design if you prefer.
I'd add one thing to the other good answers here. I think this is becoming less frequent as startups are becoming cool and thereby respected, but I still see some entrepreneurs "playing company". They print business cards, design logos and come up with slogans. Maybe they even talk with investors. All the stuff that startups do, except for the important thing: customer and product development.
Kristian has an impressive drive as an entrepreneur. With strong communications skills, deep tecnical insight, and a dedication towards quality I can highly recommend Kristian.
Kristian is a person who is able to present creative ideas and communicate the benefits. Though he is an asset to any company, Kristian has been extraordinarily helpful in consulting on many of our projects . In addition to affective advising of our web campaigns. Kristian has been inspiring and motivating to be around. I highly recommend Kristian. Sincerely, Sylvia Nielsen
