The launching of a startup is never easy. The more self aware the founder is, the greater the likelihood that said founder will make every mistake in the book, and live to tell the tale.  The thing I find most startling is how often all of us entrepreneurs keep saying the same things. Yet, somehow, we are so convinced of our own specialness or our product's awesomeness, that we aren't seeing that which is right in front of our nose. Even the Titanic sank.

Firstly, interns. The more social changey our idea is, the harder it often ends up being to get the funds and resources to launch your idea, and the greater the reliability on volunteer help.  Yet, there is a mysterious element to the whole volunteer thing, which is - leaving aside the debate over whether the institution of volunteers and interns is exploitation - the more established one's organization or venture is, the more output that volunteer tends to deliver.  In startup world, this runs counter to the actual needs of these various stages, and often leads to the roller coaster peaks and valleys situation that founders find themselves in.

When we first launched, we had a community engagement volunteer who was amazing, and a revolving number of offers for various interns that just never came through, followed by a round of yes's for every possible type of intern under the sun and every type of pro bono service offering coming our way. Today, we have defaulted to the 'if you want it done right do it yourself' credo, and soul searching on how we can truly grow sustainably.

Magical Thinking, visualizing one's vision, mind mapping and charting your idea into a viable business, are all valuable. Yet, nothing beats the simple action of just doing it, regardless of whether volunteers said they'd get it done, or whether your startup had it in the business plan.

And these are the moments when the magic of the web, the ability to translate an idea into a product one can sell, and lean, agile and integrative way that startups can now get off the ground.

That's how this website is slowly growing, and that our own 'big ask' will slowly ripple out and boomerang back to us the resources we need to grow our venture.

We planned on getting a whole new free website a few weeks ago, with a brand spanking new online community, resource directory, design interface, and new way to facilitate resource exchange between our members. Weeks past our ETA, the new site never shipped. As a result, I've taken off my CEO hat and put on my web programmer hat. Like I"ve come to say, if you are launching a startup, prepare to have perpetual hat head.

So what's our big ask? We need a site rebuild, to create the resource exchange, and to bring the 'gives and asks' framework from our live events into an online community.  We love Joomla, Wordpress and Joomla, and are seeking help to build a simple functionality into our site.

What's the first thing we'd do with a new resource exchange on our website? Exchange resources with the folks who helped us build it! Expand to new cities. Get people exchanging at our live events. Anything else we aren't thinking of?