Seeking advice from programmers for non-programmers
christonog: Dan, I can't speak to all your questions, but I'll try to help out where I can. in my experience the easiest way for a techincal person to respect a "business type" is for the business guy to know a thing or two about coding and software development. This doesn't mean knowing how to build Twitter over a weekend, but you do need to know what they're going through.With that being said, the best way to pitch an idea to a technical person (again from what I read and experience) is  to build something (even tiny) yourself. It's sort of like asking a programming question: doing all of your research and going through the problem before saying "I'm stuck, please help" generates a better response.This is the process I'm going through now. I don't have a technical background, but I'm trying my damn hardest to build something before I take the time to con some hacker to help me with building out he product :-).