[dude_abides]

Honest question: Who is the intended audience for all these startup/advice articles? Wouldn't the best founders be too busy building stuff instead of reading articles on the web. Wouldn't the majority of the audience of these articles be procrastinators (like me)? If so, wouldn't the best advice for such people be to stop procrastinating on the web, and to build stuff instead?

PS: The advice by Sam is great. I'm questioning the medium.

[diminish]

Honestly, startup advice articles are lead collection tools for ycombinator and other accelerators targeting "fresh" audiences. You may see similar advice articles from VCs too; blogging makes them more visible and help attract entrepreneurs.

[TopEntrepreneur]

You hit the nail on the head. As a top entrepreneur I spend a lot of my time reading VC blog posts. It's the best way to filter the investors I'm going to bless with the opportunity to invest in my next home run.

[isthisforme]

I can't tell if you are being serious or not, but I actually completely agree that "filter the investors I'm going to bless with the opportunity to invest in my next home run" is the right way to think about raising capital.

[TopEntrepreneur]

I'm being downvoted by VCs with crappy blogs

[benologist]

The intended audience depends who's doing it and how:

1) someone like sama, president of YC and successful in his own right, shares his experience and everyone starting up is better off for his advice, including whatever subset end up in YC. This is someone people other than himself would call a "thought leader" and we benefit from their perspective.

2) someone like DigitalOcean, years spent creating a vast archive of content for their customers that is going to lure millions of new people searching google etc to their platform. This is like the longterm, aggregate effect of what YC is doing.

3) established companies trying to reach HN cause tons of developers are here and they're hiring. Best case scenario is they teach us something that touches on our own work.

4) someone who turns to HN and hopes to sell us something or hire us or use us for SEO by way of an unrelated blog post they design for us.

There was a recent example - http://blog.desk.pm/viral/ - that turned 50,000 visitors into $1,000. The developer estimates 50,000 ideal customers would generate $25,000 in sales.

If you had to pay for HN traffic it would not be viable for most startups. If you rank #1 on Google for "email etiquette" and you're not selling an email app or an etiquette course ...

[Moto7451]

Probably the main audience is current/future/potential Y Combinator startups and the HN crowd. Just because you're "procrastinating" right now doesn't mean it won't be interesting or useful later, right?