Those in the know will tell you: If you can't find several developers to work for free on the product for a few months, you don't have a good idea.

As a developer I'm obviously biased, but the same statement could be made about marketing, business development and sales people. When you're trying to get a pre-funding idea off the ground, you're constantly trying to convince people to invest in you and your idea. I'm not talking about pitching to VCs in the hopes of getting your proverbial Smaller Piece of a Bigger Pie, but rather the perpetual activity of seeking out non-money forms of investment.

The time someone gives to listen to your plan and give you feedback is a form of investment. People are busy, especially if they're in a position to help you out. The information you get from them is valuable, otherwise you wouldn't be asking for it. So how do they expect to see a return on that investment? In my experience it's usually by returning the favor at some point in the future. Sometimes it's just an ego trip for them to exercise the power to A) shit all over your idea or B) bless it with their approval. If it's a good enough idea they'll want a favored position on your team.

Another form of non-money investment is the introduction. Reputation counts for a lot, and if someone is willing to introduce you to one of their contacts, they risk looking foolish for doing so. If you fail to impress the other party, they're going to discount future recommendations from your contact. If you do impress them on the other hand, the opposite is true and your contact gets a return on that initial introduction-investment. He will (hopefully continue to) build a reputation for knowing sharp people like you, and that in itself is valuable.

The code for your prototype is an investment. Obviously the man-hours of development time can be tallied and a rough dollar value estimate can be made based on the going hourly rate for a software developer. But that's an undervaluation in my opinion and experience. In the early stages of a software startup, the developer typically takes on the roles of requirements analyst and product marketer in addition to developer. To be fair, those hats are usually shared by others too, but ultimately the developer is responsible for transforming your ideas into bits on a disk somewhere. How does the developer expect a return on this non-money investment? Speaking for myself, it's ego-stroking, praise, the opportunity to learn and apply new technologies. In that sense, it's similar to how I look at participating in open source projects. I don't expect to get a cash return (although it's possible and would be nice) so I look to other forms of value I can get from it.

Here's what I wanted to say when I started out writing this post: when you relax the definition of investment to include types of value other than money, investors start appearing all around you. Furthermore, delivering a return on those investments isn't always a zero-sum game. You can't put ratchets on reputation.