What's considered "Traction" in the B2C app world these days?

I like to take a rule from the Steve jobs playbook and use simple circles... one larger than the other but no more than 2. your most immediate target (realistic reachable) and one of the "enemy" competitor company. or overall untapped market cap. **for this to be effective you must provide as accurate projections as possible** no bar graphs and as little or no text as possible... remember that a deck is a companion to the speaker... avoid bullet points and use the deck to entertain rather than educate... is not a class is a pitch. :)

Designer. Specifically a UX "designer" as you say, who doesn't just draw screens, and won't draw any for weeks or months. They will not just use their knowledge but will go out and talk to users, observe how they solve the same problem today, and help create the scope of work, and design the basic functionality. If you hire a developer first, they will build stuff that may or may not be of any value. If the company survives the first few rounds of building the wrong thing, you are still spending a hell of a lot in rebuilding, re-marketing, etc. etc.

What of the following things does your startup have? > Founders who have graduated from prestigious universities / previously exited companies to known acquirers / worked for a known companies (with known being a brand-name company such as Google, Amazon, Facebook etc) > Three or more months of statistically meaningful growth (e.g. for easy sake, double digit growth of a number in the thousands) > At least one investor who is active on AngelList (defined in the ideal state by at least one investment in a company who raised their round through AngelList and ideally whose social graph is connected to "high signal" members of the AngelList network) If you have none of these things, then at least, have advisors and referrers who have a strong AngelList profile. And another option is to seek out the AngelList scouts and pitch them directly. They are more open to this than anyone else and I've seen companies with very little traction and very little social proof get featured because a scout believes in the founder and/or the story. Without any or most of the above, it will be difficult to stand out or build relationships via AngelList, in my opinion. I assume now AngelList operates on a concept similar to the LinkedIn "degrees of connection" model, whereby an entrepreneur can now send unsolicited messages to investors so long as there is a degree of connection between the investor and the company. I get a few unsolicited emails a week from companies whose advisers or investors aren't people I follow but that because of the way they determine "connection strength", these unsolicited emails still gain my attention. I assume this is the case for all investors. So the more that you can build your list of advisers and referrers, the more connections you can solicit. That said, AngelList's inbound email system is almost entirely ineffective for "cold" emails to really high-profile investors. Happy to share with you what I think to be your best options for raising profile for your company.

This is a little hard to answer because it is so vague. It depends on the area, the market and the strength of innovation. I know that The App Guy has a terrific podcast at http://www.theappguy.co/ and is also trying to organize a community for App developers to sell their ideas. Let me know if I can be of further assistance to discuss patentability in terms of its value to getting a sale or license. What ever you do, don't spend money filing a full patent, just a provisional. Good luck.

Stop thinking you don't have the skills to do something. You can learn anything if you decide to, but assuming up front that you can't (forever) is dangerous. my2cents