Advisory Board

Advisory board is a fancy name for a group of wise man. In my experiences, there are two type of advisory boards:
- shiny ones
- hands on ones

In a shiny advisory board you'll have a bunch of well known names that you can put on your web site and use them for name dropping. Some investors are particularly eager to push startups to signup big brand names. In a lot of cases people used in such boards have the ability but quite often don't have time to work with you.

A hands on advisory board is a group of people that are willing work with you. Those are the ones you want to talk to and sign up. As a startup you'll need all the help you can get. You can expect them to go through your product, make some calls and do intros, read through some one pagers and give you their opinion.

When to setup advisory board? Well, first it's not a formal structure that you have to establish right at the beginning. Recruit the advisors you need as you need them.  Advisory board are more or less a name on the paper. They usually don't  meet or have a structured form. It's just a name for a list of people that you work with on a non regular basis.

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