Since a few years, if you had an idea the price for creating your first prototype got significantly lower. With a few thousand bucks and a little time you can now come up with a talented team of AD and coders that can turn most of your ideas into working prototypes. I’ve been using this approach now for years letting me rather confront ideas to the market than do old-style market studies that at the end always prove what you want to demonstrate. It’s also a great way to try new business models and validate assumptions.
Apart from my usual subcontractors with whom I built strong bonds over the years, I usually use odesk or rent-a-coder to add new specific skills to my virtual teams. Those services are great but it’s always hard to rely on them for more then a prototyping or proof of concept phase. Usually u get the basics done but the guys there fail when it comes to QA your product decently or meet deadlines. Nevertheless they are a valuable source of cheap workforce !
My point is that today, you can really launch a project with little money and go sell it. This will lead to a new generation of self-funded startups where the entrepreneurs will try to self-finance completely their project and keep a limited burn-rate as long as they can until the customers fund the growth. This is going to reshape completely the entrepreneur job since the “go get funding” stage is no longer compulsory.