Recently, I wrote a post about the launch of Prota Ventures, a venture building and early-stage investment firm. We've been hard at work on a number of items and dogfooding our own products (someone should come up with a better name for this) each week along the way. One that you can check out is MapleIQ. Need an intelligent, interactive, customer-focused landing page? This is the one for you.

One that I've been using nearly daily for the past seven weeks is Startup Rocket. During this time, I've been involved with everything from a hardware startup (making metal hairpin legs, more on that later) to helping about a half-dozen founders/pre-funded and pre-product teams work through their individual ideas while evaluating the steps of Startup Rocket along the way. We added in a few more features and steps to the framework to help take founders all the way from an idea through closing a first round of funding (if that's the path they choose to pursue; we've seen the framework also work for those bootstrapping or growing organically). Additionally, you can now see all of our current articles on the steps for launching a Tech Startup online at startuprocket.com/articles.

So, why write a post about this? Well, first - I committed to blog more, so am keeping up with that. Second, I've made a ton of notes throughout the past six weeks about why/how I find Startup Rocket valuable when working through the steps of launching a new idea.