> 8. Agencies - This ranges from people who want to build your product to those who want to file your R&D tax credits. You can spend a lot of time talking to ag

> 8. Agencies - This ranges from people who want to build your product to those who want to file your R&D tax credits. You can spend a lot of time talking to agencies, as there are a LOT of them around. Some are genuinely useful partners. You’ll often have speakers at Hacker News London espousing the benefits of using an agency that worked wonders and had aligned incentives. And that is the key, make sure your incentives and those of people you work with are aligned. Bonus structures do not work. If people fail, there’s got to be pain. There will be for you, after all, if your startup fails. Well, I hope GrantTree falls into the "genuinely useful partners" category! I'm not a fan of development agencies for startups, but for tax and grants getting a specialist firm involved makes sense, imho. Not sure about the title, btw... are those really ways startups get screwed, or just aspects of running a startup?