The weird thing was that the people I'd helped with nothing in it for me ended up being the best place to start. It was often friends at startups who need a web

The weird thing was that the people I'd helped with nothing in it for me ended up being the best place to start. It was often friends at startups who need a website building, or some friendly advice. That's not super helpful if you've not already done that: * Real life groups were pretty helpful. You can't go to these aiming to sell, but if you go aiming to learn and genuinely just get advice, they work well. * LinkedIn was pretty good, looking for people that I knew through others and asking them really nicely if I could talk about something we wanted to build. When we had better ideas that solved pain points they had, that were more unique, the response rate was much higher. This doesn't work well for "recruiter-saturated" user profiles like developers, who just ignore a lot of what goes on there. The MVPs weren't that bad - they'd work smoothly on the things that were new and special BUT they often totally lacked core functionality. We built with django so we could use django admin to do things like add users/change passwords.