No IP attorney. It's money wasted. If you're really doing something protectable, you can file a provisional patent up to a year after first public demo, and tha

No IP attorney. It's money wasted. If you're really doing something protectable, you can file a provisional patent up to a year after first public demo, and that gives you another year to file a real patent. You'll lose some international protection, but it's quite hard to stay internationally protected anyway. I am not a lawyer, please don't trust me. If neither you nor the person who wants to join the company are developers, then I would pause until you've found one. 250k is not a lot of money to build anything non-trivial, and you'll burn through it unbelievably fast if there's not a founding member who is highly technical and can evaluate how good other technical employees are going to be. If you're paying salaries and other expenses, 250k keeps a team of 5 going for like 6 months. It usually takes 3 months to raise a follow-on round, which gives a team of 5 three months to build something exciting enough to raise follow-on investment. If it's you and one or two technical co-founders, you can run an awful lot longer. If you're just paying spartan living expenses, you can get it as low as 5k per person per month (in the valley). If you take the money, chances are you'll fail. Are these experienced investors who can afford the loss? Are you okay with losing that money? If they can deal with it and you can deal with it, then I suggest you take it and stay very thrifty for a while while you figure out what's what. Get them to invest in you and the space, not in this particular product idea (since it will likely change and you want their support if that happens). Personally, I'd take it. Money's great and you can get a lot done in a few months. But only if you're willing to commit. I spent 3 or 4 years working in a space I didn't care that much about because once you have a employees and investors, it's really hard to let go. As for steps: 1) Figure out what you want 2) Find a badass developer cofounder 3) Take the money 4) Developer starts building product while you start securing first customers/users/partners, adjusting the product as you go based on your learning from talking to people